The Decline and Fall of Venice


By Ed Gibbon
Poor Venice, so far from the Goddess, so close to Los Angeles.
One hundred years ago Venice was built on wetlands with drug money. It’s been downhill ever since.

Abbot Kinney had a vision. It wasn’t from what he was smoking, Sweet Caporal tobacco, a deadly drug that ultimately killed him and many other users. Kinney turned a swamp into a mini-Venice, Italy, complete with canals, gondolas and high culture, and named it...Ocean Park! It wasn’t until 1911 that Venice became Venice. No matter. It’s the myth that counts.
On June 30, 1905, the canals began filling with ocean water. Thousands made the long trek from Los Angeles, but alas, for cheap thrills, not high culture. The amusement park, the beach, bars and gambling attracted the Angelenos, many of them just off the train from the mid-west.
Incessant fires, stagnant water in the canals and civil corruption were the main attributes that Venice shared with its namesake (at least the canals didn’t double as sewers in Kinney’s rendition).
Kinney’s smoking ultimately caught up with him in 1920. A month after his death, the pier burned down. The imperialists from Los Angeles saw their opening and began agitating for annexation of Venice. Promises of cheap water, civil improvement and a booming business climate were all the urging the Philistine businessmen needed to join the “new residents” sent to Venice by L.A. in voting for annexation. In 1925, Venetians lost their independence and are suffering yet.
Instead of civic improvements, Venice’s decline gathered speed under Los Angeles rule. The new hook-and-ladder truck owned by the Venice Fire Department was taken away and replaced by a clunker. The famed Venice Miniature Railroad was uprooted.
Los Angeles sent an army of occupation – the LAPD – and they’ve been with us since.
Fortunately, Abbot Kinney’s will stated that he was giving the canals to the city of Venice on the condition that they remain canals forever. Unfortunately, Los Angeles sued to break Kinney’s will and won in the Supreme Court. Traffic replaced serene gondolas in central Venice.
In 1930, oil was discovered in Venice. The Peninsula became a giant oil field. Had Venice still been a city, it would have been fabulously wealthy. Instead, it became a dump. 
A few years later, Santa Monica Bay was polluted by sewage - for years. No one bothered to fix it. Venice was quarantined. When Los Angeles finally did get around to building the Hyperion Sewage Treatment Center, it needed somewhere to dump the sand and dirt. It was dumped on Venice.
By Venice’s 50th anniversary, Kinney’s dream could pass for Tijuana. In fact, it did, in Orson Welles’ movie, Touch of Evil. But the worst was yet to come.
In the early 60s, Los Angeles moved in for the kill. Using “code enforcement,” the building and safety department condemned 60 percent of the historic old buildings in Venice. Many of them housed bingo parlors and thousands of elderly Jews who were survivors of Hitler’s concentration camps and garment factories in New York. St. Mark’s Hotel at Windward and Ocean Front Walk, easily Venice’s most beautiful building was obliterated by L.A. wrecking balls despite a determined fight by its owners to save it.
By then, Venice had become an oasis of culture, although perhaps not as Abbot Kinney envisioned. The Beats - poets and critics of materialist society - flourished in Venice. They became a particular target for the wrath the Los Angeles imperium. The Gas House at Market and the Ocean Front, one of the first coffee houses, was destroyed to force the Beats out. Up on Dudley Avenue, the Venice West Cafe, was closed when patrons rose to recite poetry without a city permit. The battle for free speech spilled out onto the walks and streets of Venice and is still going on.
As the 60s progressed, cheap rents attracted more free spirits to Venice, to the outrage of Los Angeles authorities. Rock concerts on the beach turned into police riots, living in Venice while Black became a crime, and smoking far less dangerous herbs than Kinney did was called a crime wave.
New schemes from the good citizens of Los Angeles to destroy Venice emerged:
“Let’s run a freeway through it. It could go right through the middle of Venice!” 
“Let’s turn the canals into a yacht harbor.”
“Let’s bulldoze North Beach and build hi-rises.”
The well-named Venice Survival Committee, Free Venice, the Peace and Freedom Party and other efforts to stand up against overwhelming power were vilified in the L.A. Times, the Santa Monica Evening Outrage (Outlook), and on radio and TV. No one stood up for Venice except Venetians.
By the 1980s, Venice witnessed its first Yuppie invasion. The media stopped playing up how dangerous Venice was with motorcycle gangs, V13, and its own ghetto. Now, Venice was becoming trendy. Expensive restaurants opened on Market Street and West Washington (now Abbot Kinney). Instead of being one of the cheapest rental areas, Venice became one of the most expensive. Still, thousands hung on to their rent-controlled apartments in their beloved Venice.
Twenty years down the line, the transformation continues. Los Angeles has stopped trying to destroy Venice by simply tearing down our homes and colonnades. Now they destroy our once-unique community by granting permits for bland monstrosities devoid of character. Even beautiful Lincoln Place, home to generations of working class and retired Venetians, is targeted to be condo-ized.
Today, almost every street in Venice has one or more of its own fortress-like giant boxes looming over carefully-designed Craftsman houses. Nearly every day, another oversized fence goes up to shield new arrivals from their neighborhood.
Down the street rumbles a giant SUV. Soon, as if by magic, a garage door rises. Without a word, the glorified truck glides into the open cavity, and boom, the door closes behind it. Was there someone at the wheel behind the tinted window? Was it an alien being who can only stand erect in a 30-foot-high cube? We’ll never know. The curtains are drawn and the door remains shut behind a high fence.
Alas, the barbarians have breached the walls. Venice is doomed.

Posted: Sun - May 1, 2005 at 01:00 PM          

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