Imagine, for a brief moment, that you are a student athlete playing on a Division 1 volleyball team. As part of your regular season, your team is competing against Cal State Long Beach on its home turf. On game day, your team bus pulls up in front of the southern Los Angeles County campus.
As you gather your kneepads and athletic tape and descend from the bus, you lay eyes on the imposing 5,000-capacity arena where you’ll be spiking and setting, hopefully for the win: only it’s an 18-story pyramid, shimmering in cobalt blue tones in the afternoon sun.
The massive pyramid housing Long Beach State’s basketball and volleyball teams, called the Walter Pyramid, is one of just a handful of mathematically true pyramids in the United States; each side measures the same 345-foot length. It’s also one of the few in California. Elsewhere, there’s the famous Luxor Pyramid in Las Vegas; the pyramid in Memphis, Tennessee, that’s home to a hotel, a museum about waterfowl hunting and a gargantuan Bass Pro Shops store; and the Summum pyramid in Salt Lake City that was built by a religious group and contains an actual mummified human inside…