Clay Ammentorp hopes to pursue a career teaching college history and considers this project to be good step toward that goal. He initially began research into the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and became curious about how it and its origin compared to other major venues throughout the city. Receiving a fellowship from the Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) gave him the means to continue and broaden his research. Throughout his project, Clay particularly enjoyed the sense of discovery from stumbling on new evidence that changed his earlier views; these discoveries gave him a sense of fully engaging in his subjects’ history.

With Los Angeles winning the 2028 Summer Olympic Games and two professional football teams, the city’s businesses and government investments in entertainment venues to house them have fallen under increasing scrutiny. Using contemporary newspapers and records along with later written histories, this paper examines Los Angeles’s extensive history with publicly financed venues to help understand the close association between the construction of these venues and the development of a new cultural identity for the rapidly growing city. The three major case studies reveal different dimensions of this pro-development movement, its motivations, and its long-term effects. The history of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum conveys how publicly financed parks and stadiums could be used as proto-gentrification that altered communities to benefit promoters, boosters, and real estate developers. The case of the Rose Bowl in Pasadena shows how the creation of these spaces helped in creating a new culture that served more to market the region than acknowledge its past. The story of the Greek Theater in Griffith Park illustrates the priorities of L.A.’s elite for the use of public land. The paper assesses how these developments continued to impact the city and what their history reveals about the priorities and methods of L.A. promoters into the modern era.

Andrew R. Highsmith School of Humanities

Clay Ammentorp’s “Building the City of Stars” is a first-rate research paper on the significance of entertainment venues to the twentieth-century growth of Los Angeles. As Ammentorp demonstrates, the construction of the L.A. Memorial Coliseum, the Rose Bowl, and the Greek Theater helped to create and then burnish the city’s reputation as a leading American metropolis. Beneath the boosters’ mythology of these landmarks, however, is a more sordid and underappreciated history of Progressive era racism, greed, and what might be called proto-gentrification. Making use of an array of primary and secondary sources, Ammentorp’s work marks an important addition to the scholarship on city building in twentieth-century America.