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Venice, is a district in west Los Angeles, California. It is best known for its canals and beaches, but it also has a somewhat Bohemian residential area as well as a colorful boardwalk. Its area codes are 310 and a recently added 424 overlay. Its ZIP Code is 90291.

History

Venice of America was founded by Abbot Kinney in 1905 as a resort town. Numerous canals were cut, and gondoliers were trained. Commercial buildings had colonnades and facades modeled on those of Venice, Italy. Several pleasure piers accomodated summer crowds who traveled by the Pacific Electric Railway ("Red Car") system. Cottages and even housekeeping tents were available for rent.

For the amusement of the public Kinney hired aviators to do aerial stunts over the beach. One of them, movie aviator and Venice airport owner B.H. DeLay, implemented the first lighted airport in the United States on DeLay Field (previously known as Ince Field). He also initiated the first aerial police in the nation, after a marine rescue attempt was thwarted. DeLay also performed many of the world's first aerial stunts for motion pictures in Venice.

The small city was annexed to Los Angeles in 1925. (There have been several movements to secede from Los Angeles since then, including in the 2000s.) In 1929 most of the canals were filled in to allow for automobile traffic. In the 1930s oil drilling supplanted amusement. Hundreds of wells covered the area and drilling waste clogged the remaining waterways. It was a short-lived boom, but the wells were still producing oil into the 1970s.

Venice and neighboring Santa Monica were hosts for a decade to the Pacific Ocean Park (POP), an amusement and pleasure-pier built atop the old Lick Pier. Though briefly popular, the facility experienced declining attendance in the mid-1960s due to increasing competition from other newer parks in Southern California such as Disneyland, Knott's Berry Farm, Busch Gardens, and Marineland, and the rotting structure was finally torn down to make way for a large residential building complex in the mid-1970s. Another aging tear-down in the 1960s was the Aragon Ballroom that had been the longtime home of The Lawrence Welk Show. The district around POP is known as Dogtown, which was home to pioneering skateboarders the Z-Boys, as profiled in the documentary film, Dogtown and Z-Boys.

Producer Roger Corman owned a production facility, the Concorde/New Horizons Studio, on Main Street for many years, in which a large number of his films were shot. This facility was torn down to build lofts.

Attractions and neighborhoods

Venice is today one of the most vibrant and eclectic areas of Southern California and it continues a tradition of progressive social change involving prominent Westsiders. The Venice Family Clinic is the largest free clinic in the country.

Venice is an unusually pedestrian-oriented area for Los Angeles: many of its houses actually have their principal entries from pedestrian-only streets, and have house numbers on these footpaths. (Automobile access is by alleys in the rear.) However, like much of Los Angeles, Venice is also well-known for traffic congestion. It lies 2 miles away from the nearest freeway, and its unusually dense network of narrow streets was not planned for the demands of modern traffic. Mindful of the tourist nature of much of the district's vehicle traffic, though, its residents have successfully fought numerous attempts to extend the Marina Freeway (CA-90) into southern Venice.

Venice Beach

Venice Beach is understood to include the beach, the promenade that runs parallel to the beach ("Ocean Front Walk" or just "the boardwalk"), Muscle Beach, the tennis courts, Skate Dancing plaza, the numerous beach volleyball courts, the bike trail and the businesses and residences that have their addresses on Ocean Front Walk. It is a great magnet for tourists, even from other parts of Los Angeles, and is well-known for its eclectic, counter-culter atmosphere.

Along the southern portion of the beach, at the end of Washington Boulevard, is the Venice Fishing Pier. A 1,310-foot concrete structure, it first opened in 1964, but was closed in 1983 due to El Niño storm damage, only reopening in the mid-1990s. On December 21, 2005, the pier again suffered damage when waves from an unusually big northern swell caused the part of the pier upon which the bathroom was located to fall into the ocean. The pier remained closed until May 25, 2006, when it was reopened after an engineering study concluded the pier was structurally sound.

Downtown Venice

The areas along Abbot Kinney and Grand Boulevards and Main Street form the traditional downtown of Venice. During the 1920s and 1930s, the area's nightlife was quite active, with thousands of Angelenos arriving every night by streetcar. (Before he burst onto the national scene, Benny Goodman had a brief residence as a bandleader in Venice.) Nightlife boomed again in the late 1960s as the area became a center of hippie culture. Since the late 1990s, downtown Venice has been especially popular, with many bars, nightclubs, art galleries, and edgy apparel shops occupying both its older brick and Art Deco storefronts and hyper-modern glass-fronted buildings.

Oakwood

The Oakwood neighborhood of Venice, which lies inland a few blocks from the tourist areas, is one of the few historically African-American areas of the West Side (although since about 1980 Latinos have considerably outnumbered other groups there). During the age of restrictive covenants that enforced racial segregation, Oakwood was set aside as a settlement area for blacks, who came by the hundreds to Venice to work in the oil fields during the 1930s and 1940s. A housing project, Lincoln Place, was built in the area by the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, housing many black families who were denied housing by white landlords. (Lincoln Place has since been converted into senior housing; in 2003, the city sold it to a private developer who has since announced plans to demolish it and build market-rate housing on the site.)

Since the 1970s, Oakwood has been notorious for crime, particularly associated with the drug trade controlled by the Venice Shoreline crew of the Crips gang. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, gunfire was heard in Oakwood on a nearly nightly basis. As with many areas, though, gentrification caused by the Southern California real estate boom of the 2000s has resulted in a significant decrease in gang activity, and the LAPD Pacific Division considers the Shorelines to be in rapid decline.

Notable residents and businesses

Venice has always been known as a hangout for the creative and the artistic. Prominent residents of Venice include actresses Julia Roberts and Anjelica Huston, actors Nicolas Cage, Tim Meadows, and musician John Lydon (who owns a sizeable amount of rental property in Venice). Singer songwriter Joshua Kadison also lives there now. Actor Robert Downey Jr. kept an apartment on the boardwalk during the 1990s. Architect Frank Gehry is a longtime resident who has bought a huge vacant lot on Harding Avenue in Venice where he plans to break ground on and build his new personal residence in August 2005. Harding Avenue is also where the Lennon Sisters of Lawrence Welk fame grew up. California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is the majority owner of a popular restaurant in Venice, Schatzi's on Main, and owns other real estate in the area. Comedian and actor Bill Cosby has also owned commercial property on Main Street for years, and has his production company there. Restauranteur Wolfgang Puck has owned and operated noted eateries in the area since the 1990s. Other notables include actors Viggo Mortensen,Rutger Hauer and Elijah Wood, and film directors Henry Jaglom and Paul Mazursky. For many years, pro wrestlers Hulk Hogan and Sting were announced as residing in Venice Beach as well. Political contributions have been sent from homes in Venice from the actor Dennis Hopper and Simpsons' creator Matt Groening. Harry Perry, the world's most famous street entertainer, is one of the boardwalk's key performers. Photographer Helen K. Garber maintains a studio on Ocean Front Walk.

Venice is today a vibrant area of Southern California and it continues a tradition of progressive social change involving prominent Westsiders. The Venice Family Clinic is the largest free clinic in the country. Women in Recovery, Inc., a non-profit organization offering a live-in, 12-step program of rehabilitation for women in need, was founded by a longtime resident of Venice, Sister Ada Geraghty. Geraghty and her organization on Coeur D' Alene Avenue annually honor those who've made a difference in helping women overcome substance abuse problems. The 2006 honoree for Women in Recovery is Christopher Kennedy Lawford; past honorees have included Jamie Lee Curtis, Angela Lansbury, and Anthony Hopkins.

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Los Angeles County Lifeguards

Venice Beach is the headquarters of the Los Angeles County Lifeguard Division of the Fire Department. It is located at 2300 Ocean Front Walk. It is the nation's largest ocean lifeguard organizations with over 100 full-time and 600 part-time or seasonal lifeguards. The headquarter building used to be the City of Los Angeles Lifeguard Headquarters until they were merged into the County System in 1975. The department is commonly referred to by Angelenos as Baywatch Lifeguards.

The Los Angeles County Lifeguards safeguard 31 miles of beach and 70 miles of coastline, from San Pedro in the south, to Malibu in the north. Lifeguards also provide Paramedic and rescue boat services to Catalina Island, with operations out of Avalon and the Isthmus.

Lifeguard Division employs 120 full-time and 600 seasonal lifeguards, operating out of three Sectional Headquarters, located in Hermosa, Santa Monica, and Zuma beach. Each of these headquarters staffs a 24-hour EMT-D response unit, and are part of the 911 system. In addition to providing for beach safety, Los Angeles County Lifeguards have specialized training for Baywatch rescue boat operations, underwater rescue and recovery, swiftwater rescue, cliff rescue, marine mammal rescue and marine firefighting.

Education

Venice is served by many Los Angeles Unified School District schools. The neighborhood is served by Coeur d'Alene Avenue Elementary School and Westminster Avenue Elementary School. Students go on to Mark Twain Middle School. High school students attend Venice High School, which is actually in the neighborhood of Mar Vista.

Venice is also served by the elementary school of the St. Mark Catholic Parish.

Venice in the media

Dozens of movies and hundreds television shows have used locations in Venice, including its beach, its pleasure piers, the canals and colonades, the boardwalk, the high school, even a particular hamburger stand. For a complete list of movies shot in Venice, see: Venice California History Site - Movie Making in Venice. Various Venice venues are visible in this list of selected media:

Venice on Film

Television

Books

  • Bradbury, Ray. Death is a Lonely Business Knopf 1985, ISBN 0394547020. Hard boiled detective mystery taking place in Venice circa 1949.
  • Garber, Helen K.. Venice Beach, California Carnivale, Xlibris 2005, ISBN 1413491081. Photographs of the surreal life on Ocean Front Walk. Official Commemorative Book of the Venice Centennial (1905 - 2005).

Video games

External links

Los Angeles neighborhoods | Busking venues

Venice Beach | Venice (Californie) | Venice Beach | Venice, Kalifornien

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Venice, Los Angeles, California".

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