Many of the biographies and memoirs I’ve read often mention how on Friday nights they would go to the Vine St Brown Derby for an early dinner. Not because they’d reached the end of a long and tiring week filming their latest movie, but because Friday nights were the big fight night at the Hollywood Legion Stadium a couple of blocks away at 1628 El Centro Ave. But until I came across this photo, I’d never seen what the place looked like. The fancy car parked out front is a circa 1931 Cadillac and was typical of the cars pulling up on Friday nights ready to drop off well-heeled people looking forward to an evening of watching two men pummel each other. I do, however, wonder what the guy on the roof is doing.
Lew I. says: “Boxing on Fridays. Wrestling on Mondays at the HLS. The only two nighttime telecasts during the week on W6XAO (Channel 2) in 1947. My father was a friend of Joe Varga, a former professional wrestler, who often refereed at the stadium. His son Billy became a huge “good guy” wrestling star. My dad once took me there when I was in my early teens to see a headline match featuring “Nature Boy” Buddy Rogers, who was then the reigning world champion.”
The stadium is no longer there, but on that site now stands an LA Fitness gym, so the history of working out on that lot continues. This image is from May 2022.
You do great work. Love how you tie the past to the present.
Thanks, Harvey. I’m very glad to hear you enjoy my various posts and musings.
It was a bowling alley previously before the gym it is now
Thanks, Joel!
According to information I found at hollywoodpartnership-dot-com, the stadium was built “in 1919 as an open-air stadium…A roof was added in 1921 and in 1938 it was re-modeled into a 6,000-seat arena…[It] was closed briefly on July 11, 1923, to sink the boxing ring six feet, increasing the pitch of ringside seats so that all patrons had a good view of the ring, and to add a ventilation system that recycled the air every 10 minutes. According to the Los Angeles Times of the day, the venue then accommodated 5,100 people. (Other sources say the seating was reduced to 4,500.) A second version of this venue opened in late 1938 with a capacity of about 6,300. Black boxers were not allowed to fight here until 1940.”
Amazingly enough, assuming this article is correct, the structure itself is still that of the Legion Stadium. To wit: “After a final boxing card on September 12, 1959 and a wrestling bill two nights later, the stadium indeed went down for its final count when it ceased being a fight and wrestling palace. Then in the 1980s it had a third act as fitness gym when Holiday Spa Clubs injected $11-million into its rejuvenation. With its original outer shell and trusses still intact, it was the largest single historical retention project in Hollywood’s 100-year history at the time.”