By: Serena Xiao

Figure skating shows, ski jumping competitions, rock concerts, motocross championships, auto races, football competitions, soccer competitions, hockey competitions, and much more are held at the Coliseum Stadium. Built in 1923, the Coliseum Stadium is a stadium located in Los Angeles, CA, with a capacity of 77,500. “The Coliseum wasn’t built for just one purpose,” says Frank Guridy, a Columbia University professor who studies the civic impact of stadiums and arenas. “It’s a good, old-fashioned, single-tiered facility big enough to accommodate a bunch of different things.”

Every time the event changes, the flooring must be changed as well. During the summer of 1936, the Coliseum invited three time Olympic gold medalist Sonja Henie to the stadium for a performance. The workers had to remove the grass and replace it with coils and ice to create an 80-foot rink. However the ice turned into water under the sun, so the show was canceled.

Two years after that, during the winter of 1938, a ski jumping competition was supposed to be held in the Coliseum. But because of the heavy rain, it had to be delayed. However, the promoter was able to build a 300-foot ramp going from the top seats toward the field, and the weather changed in time for the competition to be held two nights later.

In the late 1950’s, the Dodgers, a professional baseball team, made the Coliseum their temporary home. At that time, the Coliseum had a fence through the field which was only 250-feet long (a normal field is about 120-yards long).

In the 1970’s, the Superbowl of Motocross came to the Coliseum. They need to build a track for the competition, which ended up requiring more than 6,000 cubic yards of clay and decomposed granite. Promoters tried to protect the grass from the dirt bikes that were going to land on it forcefully. “We laid plastic down over the grass but it ripped in several places and the Coliseum drains were plugged with dirt,” a promoter told The Los Angeles Times in 1974. “You know what plumbers cost.”

But the promoters eventually just started to replace the ruined grass with new grass instead of trying to fix it. There was no longer any time to carefully fix the original grass as more events were held at the Coliseum. “Anything that’s going to be out there for any length of time, when coupled with a lot of weight… the turf is pretty much toast underneath,” said Scott Lupold, who is in charge of maintaining a presentable field.

“We’ve done a lot of these things with concerts and replaced the field on really short windows,” Lupold says. “Knock on wood, we’ve been pretty good at pulling it off.”