Muscle Beach

By the late 1950s Muscle Beach had begun to draw what many of the old-timers considered unsavory characters, and a series of incidents, some of which were criminal in nature, caused the city to close Muscle Beach and haul away the weights. Some close observers believe that the city, although somewhat worried by the sorts of people who had been joining the throng, was primarily motivated by a desire for more parking for shoppers and tourists.

Whatever the reason, Muscle Beach ceased to exist in its original fabled form. Unwilling to be without a place to train by the beach, however, a dedicated group of bodybuilders convinced the city of Venice to put in a small weight pit two miles south of the old location. In time, Venice Beach began to draw a regular crowd, which reached its apex during the heyday of the bodybuilding career of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Venice Beach was often the location chosen by magazine publisher Joe Weider for photo shoots of Arnie for Muscle & Fitness, the leading magazine in the field. These photographs helped both Weider and Schwarzenegger, and they perpetuated the legend of Southern California as the terminus ad quem for bodybuilders everywhere.

In 1974, Schwarzenegger was training for his sixth victory in the International Federation of Bodybuilders' Mr. Olympia contest, the premier title in the sport. His training--along with that of several of his rivals, and the competition itself--became the subject of a remarkable documentary film, Pumping Iron (1976). Conceived and scripted by Charles Gaines and filmed by George Butler, the film was a huge critical success and, in the process, made a celebrity of Arnie, leading to his casting in the title role of the successful Conan the Barbarian (1981). Pumping Iron and Arnold introduced bodybuilding to a wider public, and in so doing gained acceptance for weight training as a way to develop a leaner, healthier body.

As bodybuilding rode Arnie's broad back to ever greater popularity, Venice Beach, which officially adopted the name, "Venice Muscle Beach" in 1986, finally decided to expand the weight training area, and a much larger facility was built with a stage which can accommodate bodybuilding competitions. In the late 1990s, in a major change of heart, Santa Monica also built a new facility on the site of the old Muscle Beach platforms, complete with an open-air weight pit and a place for children to exercise. Muscle Beach has seen many changes in the years since the 1930s, and the changes have not all been good ones. Drugs now play a major and sinister role in competitive bodybuilding and they have allowed bodybuilders to develop a combination of muscle mass and definition that the health-conscious bodybuilders of earlier decades could not have imagined. The men and women who were first drawn to Muscle Beach trained hard in the fresh air, ate carefully, and were healthy as horses. Good health was at the heart of their lifestyle. Many of the top competitors in the 1990s have made a Faustian bargain and sacrificed health for appearance. Some of the bodies that a visitor to Muscle Beach might see at the beginning of the twenty-first century, unlike those in the middle of the twentieth, might only look healthy.

St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, 2002 Gale Group.