The Los Angeles Swim Stadium has a history as deep as its own deepest end.
The 1932 Summer Olympics -- for which the now-public swim facility at the Exposition Park Intergenerational Community Center was built -- put Los Angeles on the world's sports map.
At the stadium, future movie star Clarence "Buster" Crabbe took home the gold medal in the 400-meter freestyle. A teenager named Eleanor Holm won the 100-meter backstroke. (A liquid other than water got her kicked off the 1936 Olympic team, after Holm, by then a married woman, sipped champagne aboard a ship en route to the Berlin Games.)
Behind the historic facade, freshly polished and restored, is a $30-million complex, a blend of 1930s style with 21st century state-of-the-art glass and steel architecture.
The original stadium was built as the world tumbled deeper into depression and political tensions. Before Los Angeles stepped in to host the Games, the event itself was in jeopardy.
The city turned a smallish gathering, with only 40 nations and 1,500 athletes competing, into a festive summer respite from the harsh headlines of the day. It was also a reminder to the world of why the Games were important.
The Olympics were still an amateurs-only event, and as the official book of that 10th Olympiad noted, athletes were giving every effort "without hope of reward, other than the honor which they may bring to their country, to their sport and to themselves."
On opening day, July 30, 1932, a 300-piece band marched into the Coliseum and struck up "The Stars and Stripes Forever." There were cheers from the assembled 105,000 spectators, and thousands of doves circled overhead as they tried to reach the arena's rim. The nation's vice president, Charles Curtis, was delegated to open the Games. A 10-shot cannon salute was followed by the bleat of half a dozen trumpets. With that, the Games began.
At the swim stadium next door, Japan won five of six gold medals in men's swimming. One of Japan's swimmers eclipsed the 100-meter freestyle record set in the 1928 Olympics by Johnny Weissmuller, who, like Crabbe, would go on to play Tarzan in films. Weissmuller, a spectator in 1932, jumped over a fence from the front row to watch his buddy Crabbe win the gold.
The Olympics seemed to create Tarzan stars; Eleanor Holm appeared as the leading lady in the 1938 film "Tarzan's Revenge," opposite 1936 decathlon gold medalist Glenn Morris.
