Venice, Los Angeles
Based on Wikipedia: Venice, Los Angeles
A wealthy tobacco heir once won a stretch of California marshland in a coin flip—and decided to recreate one of the world's most romantic cities right there on the Pacific coast. The result was Venice, California, a neighborhood that has cycled through more identities than perhaps any other place in America: seaside amusement park, oil boomtown, beatnik haven, gang territory, and finally, one of the most expensive slices of real estate on the planet.
The Coin Flip That Built a City
Abbot Kinney was already rich when he arrived in Southern California. He'd made his fortune in the cigarette business and spent years traveling the world—including extensive time in the actual Venice, Italy. When his business partnership dissolved in 1904, Kinney and his former partners had to divide their coastal property. The northern section was desirable; the southern stretch was swampland. They flipped a coin.
Kinney lost. Or so it seemed.
He got the marsh, and he decided to drain it by digging canals—just like the Italian city he loved. By July 4, 1905, Venice of America opened to the public with several miles of navigable canals, gondolas (with actual Italian gondoliers), a twelve-hundred-foot pier featuring an auditorium and ship restaurant, a hot saltwater swimming pool, and an entire block of buildings designed in Venetian Renaissance style. The architect Felix Peano carved faces into the column capitals, including one of Kinney himself and another of a mysterious woman named Nettie Bouck.
The whole thing sounds ridiculous. It was also wildly successful.
Red Cars and Roller Coasters
To understand early Venice, you need to understand the Red Cars. The Pacific Electric Railway was one of the largest electric railway systems in the world, connecting the sprawling communities of Southern California before freeways existed. Tourists could hop on a Red Car in downtown Los Angeles or Santa Monica and arrive at Venice's beach within the hour.
And arrive they did. By 1910, the permanent population had swelled past ten thousand, but on weekends, fifty to one hundred fifty thousand visitors would flood the town. They rode the Venice Miniature Railway, a tiny train that looped through the streets. They swam at the gently sloping mile-long beach. They rented cottages or, for the truly budget-conscious, "housekeeping tents."
The entertainment grew more elaborate each year. By the mid-1920s, the Kinney Pier had three roller coasters, a Dragon Slide, a Fun House, a Flying Circus aerial ride, and something called a Mill Chutes—an early water flume. It was, by most accounts, the finest amusement pier on the West Coast.
Kinney also hired aviators to perform aerial stunts over the beach. One pilot, B. H. DeLay, went on to create the nation's first lighted airport and organized America's first aerial police force. He pioneered many of the aerial cinematography techniques that Hollywood would use for decades.
Governance by Iron Hand
Running Venice was complicated. The business district was awkwardly confined to just three one-block streets, while City Hall sat more than a mile away. Competing commercial districts sprang up, creating political factions. Kinney managed to hold everything together through sheer force of personality.
Then, in November 1920, he died.
Six weeks later, the amusement pier burned down.
Prohibition had just begun, eliminating tax revenue from bars and restaurants. The Kinney family rebuilt their pier quickly, but the political situation deteriorated. In 1922, the city treasurer was convicted of embezzling thousands of dollars. By 1925, the roads were falling apart, the water system couldn't keep pace with growth, and the sewage infrastructure was failing.
Venice had lasted just twenty years as an independent city. In 1926, it was annexed by Los Angeles, its larger and hungrier neighbor to the east.
The Oil Beneath the Beach
In 1929, drillers struck oil on the Venice Peninsula, just south of Washington Street. Within two years, four hundred fifty oil wells sprouted across the neighborhood—a forest of derricks rising from the sand. The drilling waste clogged what remained of the canals. The whole scene was captured in the Venice Post Office mural, where cheerful beachgoers in old-fashioned bathing suits stand incongruously beside ominous industrial equipment.
The timing was accidentally perfect. The oil boom provided desperately needed income during the Great Depression, even as it transformed the landscape into something resembling an industrial site more than a resort town. Most wells were eventually capped by the 1970s; the last ones, near the Venice Pavilion, didn't close until 1991.
The Slum by the Sea
Los Angeles never quite knew what to do with Venice.
The canals—those expensive, romantic waterways that had defined the town's identity—were mostly filled in and paved over during the late 1920s and 1930s. The lagoon became a traffic circle. The new city government showed little interest in maintaining what it viewed as an outdated curiosity from an earlier era's land speculation.
By the 1950s, decades of neglect had earned Venice a new nickname: "the Slum by the Sea."
Here's the thing about slums, though: they're cheap. And cheap rent attracts interesting people.
European immigrants arrived, including a substantial number of Holocaust survivors seeking affordable housing near the ocean. Young artists and writers discovered they could actually afford studio space. The Beat Generation found a home at the Gas House on Ocean Front Walk and Venice West Cafe on Dudley Avenue. Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and their circle made Venice a secondary outpost of the literary movement centered in San Francisco.
The city didn't pave the main thoroughfare—called, with unintentional irony, Trolleyway—until 1954, nearly three decades after annexation, and only then because county and state funds became available.
The Dark Decades
Venice's affordability had a shadow side. The Venice Shoreline Crips, founded in the early 1970s, became one of the first Crip sets in Los Angeles. The Latino gang Venice 13, known as V-13, dated back even further, to the 1950s. By the early 1990s, the two gangs were locked in fierce territorial battles over the crack cocaine trade.
This wasn't abstract urban decay. It was violence on streets where tourists walked to the beach, in alleyways behind the remaining canals, near the boardwalk where vendors sold sunglasses and body oil. Venice contained multitudes: celebrities and homeless encampments, million-dollar properties and gang shootings, art galleries and drug markets.
By 2002, increased police presence and rising rents had pushed many gang members out of the neighborhood. Gentrification, that double-edged phenomenon, was transforming Venice again.
The Boardwalk and the Beach
Through all these transformations, one thing remained constant: the beach.
Venice Beach draws millions of visitors annually to its two-and-a-half-mile pedestrian promenade—Ocean Front Walk—where the expected mingles with the bizarre. Street performers, fortune-tellers, and vendors create a perpetual carnival atmosphere. Muscle Beach, the outdoor gym where bodybuilders have trained since the 1930s, became world-famous as a launching pad for fitness celebrities.
The basketball courts developed a legendary reputation for streetball—that improvisational, intensely competitive style of urban basketball. Professional players have been recruited from pickup games on these courts. The competition is notoriously fierce.
There are handball courts, paddle tennis courts, a skate dancing plaza, and beach volleyball courts that host serious players year-round. A bike path runs along the shore. The Venice Fishing Pier extends over thirteen hundred feet into the Pacific, though it's had a rough history—El Niño storms damaged it in 1983 and again in 2005.
Just north of the pier lies the Venice Breakwater, a beloved local surf spot. An artificial barrier of sand, piping, and large rocks creates waves that break reliably when conditions are right. It's a different world from the boardwalk chaos, populated by surfers who've been riding here for generations.
The 2028 Summer Olympics will bring Venice back to international attention when the beach hosts triathlon events and serves as the starting point for both the marathon and road cycling competitions.
The Canals That Survived
Not all of Kinney's canals were destroyed. Six of them survive in a residential neighborhood a few blocks from the beach, their banks lined with eclectic homes ranging from modest cottages to architectural showpieces worth millions. Foot bridges arc over the water. Ducks and the occasional kayaker glide past. It feels like a secret garden hidden within one of America's densest urban areas.
These canals were nearly lost too. After annexation, Los Angeles planned to fill them all in. A three-year court battle by canal residents in the late 1920s managed to save this portion, though many streets were still paved over. The surviving canals were designated a historic district in 1982 and underwent major rehabilitation in 1993, including the installation of new bulkheads and circulation gates to keep the water from stagnating.
Abbott Kinney Boulevard
A street named after the founder—though spelled with two t's rather than one—has become one of Los Angeles's most fashionable commercial strips. This wasn't always the case. Through the 1980s, it was called West Washington Boulevard, a derelict stretch of run-down beach cottages and empty brick industrial buildings.
The renaming was explicitly a marketing strategy. Community groups and property owners pushed for it in the late 1980s, hoping to attract new investment. It worked. Today the street is lined with boutiques, galleries, restaurants, and bars that draw visitors from across the city. A building that once housed Upton Sinclair's gubernatorial campaign office and later one of Venice's first art galleries now anchors a neighborhood where a one-bedroom apartment can rent for several thousand dollars a month.
The Housing Paradox
Venice presents one of urban planning's strangest contradictions. Between 2007 and 2022, despite skyrocketing property values and constant construction activity, the number of available housing units actually decreased. Venice Beach has been called one of the most difficult places in the United States to build new housing.
The problem is that Venice was developed before modern zoning existed. Along Pacific Avenue, early 1900s multifamily buildings still stand—some containing thirty units on a single lot with no parking whatsoever. Current regulations typically mandate one housing unit per fifteen hundred square feet of lot area. You couldn't legally build what already exists.
This creates a peculiar dynamic. The old dense housing, technically "nonconforming" under current rules, remains legal as long as it stands. But if you tear it down, you can only rebuild at lower density. So property owners face an impossible choice: maintain aging buildings forever or reduce the neighborhood's housing capacity.
Meanwhile, as of 2020, approximately two thousand homeless people lived in Venice, up from one hundred seventy-five in 2014. Tent encampments line some streets. The city opened a transitional shelter in 2020 with one hundred fifty-four beds in a former bus yard; it closed in 2024.
Oakwood
Inland from the tourist areas lies Oakwood, one of the few historically African-American neighborhoods in West Los Angeles. Its history diverges sharply from the beach's narrative of bohemian artists and wealthy newcomers.
When restrictive covenants and redlining practices excluded Black residents from most of Los Angeles's desirable neighborhoods, Oakwood was one of the few places they could legally live and own property near the coast. Generations of African-American families built their lives here, creating a tight-knit community with its own churches, businesses, and social networks.
Gentrification has transformed Oakwood too. Long-time residents face displacement as property values soar. The demographic composition has shifted dramatically. What was once a working-class Black neighborhood is increasingly affluent and white. The gangs that once controlled the streets have largely dispersed, but so have many of the families who made Oakwood a community.
The Post Office Mural
In 1941, a Modernist artist named Edward Biberman painted a mural inside the Venice Post Office, a red-tile-roofed building on Windward Circle constructed two years earlier as a New Deal project. The mural captured Venice's contradictions perfectly: Abbot Kinney stands in the center, surrounded by beachgoers in old-fashioned bathing suits and workers in overalls. On one side, a wooden roller coaster represents the amusement pier era. On the other, oil derricks loom ominously.
The senior curator of American Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art called it one of the better New Deal post office murals, both artistically and historically. The juxtaposition of leisure and industry, of recreation and extraction, told the true story of Venice better than any promotional brochure ever could.
When the post office closed in 2012, movie producer Joel Silver purchased the building for seven and a half million dollars to use as headquarters for his production company. The sale stipulated that the mural must be preserved and remain accessible to the public. Silver spent about one hundred thousand dollars restoring it over more than a year.
Then, in 2019, he sold the building for twenty-two and a half million dollars to a British investor. The mural's current whereabouts are unknown, putting the new owner in violation of the original lease agreement's public access requirement.
Venice's history, quite literally, has been misplaced.
Traffic and Transformation
Like much of Los Angeles, Venice now suffers from severe traffic congestion. But Venice's case is particularly acute. The nearest freeway lies two miles away. The neighborhood's unusually dense network of narrow streets—designed for a resort town served by streetcars, not a commuter community dependent on automobiles—was never meant to handle modern traffic volumes.
Many homes have their front doors on pedestrian-only streets, with car access only through rear alleys. This creates charming, walkable residential blocks—but contributes to the traffic chaos when everyone must funnel through the same limited routes.
The walk streets, as they're called, comprise around six hundred twenty single-family homes. They represent Venice's continuing resistance to the automobile-centric development that transformed most of Los Angeles. Whether this is precious historic preservation or dysfunctional urban planning depends entirely on whether you're walking or driving.
Venice Today
The neighborhood that began as one man's eccentric tribute to an Italian city has become something no one could have planned. Skateboard culture flourishes alongside tech-company offices. Homeless encampments sit blocks from multimillion-dollar homes. Street performers work the same boardwalk they did a century ago, though the acts have changed.
The connection to skateboarding runs particularly deep. Venice's smooth concrete surfaces, architectural diversity, and anything-goes attitude made it a birthplace of modern street skating. The legendary Z-Boys emerged from nearby Santa Monica and Venice in the 1970s, revolutionizing the sport by applying surfing techniques to the empty swimming pools of drought-stricken Southern California. That lineage continues today in the skate parks and sidewalks where new generations learn the same defiant art.
Abbot Kinney could never have imagined any of this. He wanted to build a cultured resort town with gondolas and Renaissance architecture. Instead, he created something far stranger and more resilient: a neighborhood that has reinvented itself every few decades while somehow maintaining its essential character as a place where misfits can find each other, where the beach remains free and open to everyone, and where the line between spectacle and authentic community has never been entirely clear.
The coin flip he lost turned out to be the best bet he ever won.