Muscle Beach Venice Gym
Fenced-in outdoor weight pen on the boardwalk where bodybuilding legends trained since the nineteen sixties.
This guide to Muscle Beach Venice Gym opens with a December 1958 scandal in Santa Monica that led to arrests, bulldozers, and the erasure of the original Muscle Beach where the American bodybuilding craze began in the nineteen thirties. It follows the athletes as they relocate two miles south to a gym owner's own property, and the young Austrian named Arnold Schwarzenegger who trained here alongside Dave Draper, Franco Columbu, and Frank Zane through the sixties and seventies. Stand at the fence and you're looking at the same worn barbells and open-air platform that carried Gold's Gym around the world.
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