The Grand Olympic Auditorium—originally simply the Olympic Auditorium—was built in 1924 and opened on August 5, 1925, named in anticipation of the 1932 Los Angeles Summer Olympics it was expected to host. The building could hold more than 10,000 spectators and was designed with the utilitarian efficiency of an arena meant for serious athletic competition rather than theatrical spectacle. When the 1932 Olympics arrived, the auditorium was leased by the organizing committee and served as the venue for boxing, wrestling, and weightlifting events.

After the Games, the auditorium became a permanent fixture of the downtown sports landscape. By 1936, promoters could boast that it was generating more gate revenue than either Chicago Stadium or Madison Square Garden. Los Angeles had, briefly, the busiest fight venue in the country.

Through the 1940s, 1950s, and into the 1960s, the Olympic hosted championship bouts across multiple weight classes. The building's proximity to the city's Latino communities meant that Mexican and Mexican-American fighters drew enormous crowds. The venue had an intensity particular to boxing arenas of the era—close quarters, cigar smoke, the physical proximity of the audience to the action.

Wrestling proved equally popular. Promoters developed elaborate storylines and colorful characters for the Olympic's regular card, pioneering the theatrical model that professional wrestling would adopt nationally. The Olympic crowd helped teach American promoters that the performance of wrestling could draw as reliably as the sport.

By the 1970s, the Olympic had declined. Boxing had moved to newer, larger venues. The building was showing its age. When Los Angeles punk rock emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it needed venues that were cheap, tolerant of chaos, and didn't mind if the audience was younger and rowdier than typical concert crowds.

The Olympic fit. Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, and the Dead Kennedys played the auditorium during the years when LA punk was defining itself. The venue's physical toughness—concrete floors, minimal amenities, the residual atmosphere of decades of athletic combat—suited the music. When Rage Against the Machine played their final show at the Olympic in September 2000, it was a kind of punctuation mark on two decades of the building's alternative cultural life.

The Olympic was used as a filming location repeatedly during its long life—Rocky and Raging Bull both used it, and The Manchurian Candidate was filmed there in 1962. The interior's undisguised functionalism read convincingly as arenas from any era.

The building closed in the mid-1980s, reopened in 1993 with a reduced capacity of 7,300 (down from its original 10,400), and eventually changed hands multiple times. In 2005, the Glory Church of Jesus Christ, a Korean-American congregation, purchased the building. The auditorium is now used for worship services. The congregation has made clear that the building's history matters to them. The name Olympic, at least, remains.