Absurd. “To live as I have done is surely absurd.” The opening line to Beat writer Jack Micheline’s work A Poem to the Freaks, wasn’t written in Venice, California, but it’s the kind of thing you might hear the city whispering, if cities could whisper.

Conceived by a romantic (in the literary sense) who was also a fierce businessman, built on a marsh, celebrated by throngs in search of distraction, destroyed by fire, sewage and politics, and ultimately raised from the mire in tatters and redeemed on the shoulders of the dispossessed only to emerge decades later as an enclave of the newly minted who are attracted by the eccentric reputation and history but who reject living with the eccentricities themselves… Venice is indeed absurd. And for most of its true fans, that’s beautiful.

Venice was Abbot Kinney’s idea. Born in 1850 in New Jersey, the nephew of a U.S. Senator was the youngest of five brothers, asthmatic and 6’ 2” tall by the time he was 16. Somewhat typical for the well-heeled of the day, the young Kinney was sent abroad to round out his education. Heidelberg, Paris and Zurich all had him studying, while an extensive European tour before he returned Stateside found him wondering at marvels in, among other places, Venice, Italy. When he returned home, he joined a U.S. Geological Survey team mapping the Sioux Indian Reservation in what was then the Dakota Territory. After that, he joined his brothers’ tobacco business on the East Coast, heading abroad again as a tobacco buyer to far-off locales like Egypt and Turkish Macedonia, and making use of his linguistic skills (he spoke French, Spanish, Italian, German and Arabic). In 1876, in what is now Thessaloniki, Kinney was caught up in a Turkish massacre of thousands of Christians and narrowly escaped with his life. The experience convinced the 26-year-old to take a semi-retirement, and he spent the next three years traveling. India, New Guinea, Australia and Hawaii were all ports of call, but California is where his trip ended. After arriving in San Francisco, he headed for a resort further south in hopes of curing his asthma. As the story has it, the place did the trick, Kinney felt great and decided to put down roots. He married the daughter of a State Supreme Court justice, planted a citrus grove with the intention of being a produce man, and started a family.

The next few years were alternately blessed and cursed with family and financial triumphs and tragedies, but his most enduring story began with a coin toss in 1904, when he decided to bet on a dream.

In 1891, Kinney and a partner bought a casino and a large stretch of marshland on the ocean just south of Santa Monica. Seven years later, the pair opened Ocean Park, a small community with beach cottages, a commercial district, golf links and more. Kinney’s partner died in 1898, a new partner came on but quickly sold his half of the company to other investors with whom, as fate would have it, Kinney did not get along. The company’s holdings basically included the Ocean Park development, which was closer to Santa Monica, and the undeveloped marshland to the south. In 1904, at a meeting to dissolve the company, a coin toss was held to decide who got first pick of the assets, Kinney won and—surprisingly, and perhaps stupidly, to some—decided he’d have the marsh.

Kinney dreamed of building “Venice of America,” and he thought the marshland was the ideal place for it. He envisioned canals, gondolas, colonnaded shopping arcades and the Old World feeling of Italy set on the Pacific, accessible via trolley from downtown Los Angeles. A man named Henry Huntington was just starting work on “Naples” in Long Beach, California, with canals and gondolas of its own. But Kinney’s dream was the original, it was the biggest and—after battling storms, enormous construction difficulties and myriad other issues—it was the first to come true.

On July 4, 1905, Venice of America celebrated its grand opening “to great fanfare,” as they say, and Los Angeles gained one of the most enduring aspects of its character.

Branching off a Grand Canal that was half a mile long and 70 feet wide, a network of nearly two miles of smaller canals flowed under arched bridges past bungalows, residential lots, and a small “tent city” Kinney built as an economy hotel of sorts, ultimately meeting at a main lagoon. The opening must have been a sight: There were swimming races in the main lagoon, rides on gondolas that had been imported from the “real” Venice, fireworks, boat races, concerts, new restaurants and hotels, and all manner of street attractions. Nearly 20,000 visitors came to see the manifestation of a project many had believed would end in folly. Venice was off and running.

PIERS
When it came to creating seaside attractions in the early 20th century, it was all about the piers. But these weren’t simple planked affairs jutting into the sea from which lazy hobbyists drop fishing lines. Early piers were massive affairs with dancehalls, theaters, wild amusement rides, restaurants, hotels, funhouses and the like. When Venice of America opened, the nearby Ocean Park Pier was going strong. In fact, the day of the Venice opening, Ocean Park Pier premiered its new $150,000 heated saltwater “plunge,” the contemporary name for a large pool. Kinney had, of course, been part of developing Ocean Park, and for years his Abbot Kinney Pier and the one at Ocean Park—along with a number of other piers in the area—would compete for visitors, constantly trying to outdo each other with bigger attractions, finer hotels, better games, longer dance competitions, more impressive performers and the like.

In the case of the Abbot Kinney Pier, it eventually featured a massive dancehall that could hold 800 couples on its floor, a 3,000-seat auditorium (in which the French actress Sarah Bernhardt performed in 1906), and an aquarium with a seal and sea lion tank, plus 48 other glass tanks containing local specimens. A short-lived roller skating fad found a home at a skating rink in Venice, a 2,500-seat amphitheater on the lagoon hosted all manner of entertainment, and Kinney opened his own saltwater pool, which could accommodate 2,000 bathers at once.

By 1911 the city of Ocean Park had officially changed its name to Venice, and local merchants were settling down to the business of doing business. For the next 40 years, that business was amusement.

“Fraser’s Million Dollar Pier” opened the same year Venice made its name official with a large dancehall, roller coasters, a vaudeville theater and more. A miniature working model of the Panama Canal (construction on the real thing started in 1904 and fascinated the public at the time) joined fun houses, carousels and a popular exhibit called “Infant Incubators,” in which premature babies were displayed—and cared for, with assistance they likely could not get in hospitals of the day. Kinney’s pier eventually had an ostrich farm, zoological garden, and underground China exhibit with wax models of, among other things, an opium den.

Other area attractions included houses of horror (“Darkness & Dawn” and “Hades” were popular); more than 14 roller coasters, including the Race Thru the Clouds ride in which two roller coasters raced each other on side-by-side tracks; and the Dragon Slide, which had patrons riding burlap sacks down a spiraling slide 99 feet high (bamboo splinters were apparently a common complaint). There were multi-day dance marathons; beauty pageants; a miniature railroad to ferry people around; a motordrome in which daredevil drivers would speed around a giant wooden bowl with 65-degree walls (one of the drivers, Tom Prior, died when his car went a bit high, hit a post and smashed into pieces); a barnstorming plane ride; Ferris wheels; roller rinks; and on and on and on. The crowd’s enthusiasm lasted only as long as it took to open the next attraction—and that wasn’t long. Jake Cox, a movie stuntman, used to put on a carpeted suit, douse himself with kerosene, light himself on fire and then dive from the rafters of the plunge pool into the water below to attract visitors, but this eventually failed to impress the crowds and he had to amend his act to lighting himself on fire and jumping into the Pacific at night from the wing of an airplane.

As much as it might have brought in a few paying customers, fire, it turns out, was a problem for the piers. The “Million Dollar Pier” burned mostly to the waterline in 1912, then burned again in 1915 after being rebuilt. Abbot Kinney’s pier burned in 1920, again almost completely, and two more piers (The Pickering and Lick Piers) burned down in 1924.

CHANGES
Movies were filmed here, celebrities lived in the hotels (Charlie Chaplin lived in the penthouse at the Waldorf on Ocean Front Walk from 1915 to 1920), locals drank, danced and gambled here and the area got a reputation. When Abbot Kinney died, in 1920, Venice was in trouble. Mismanagement and a drop in city revenues led to annexation by the City of Los Angeles in 1925, which did no immediate favors—the first thing LA did was appropriate the Venice Fire Department’s brand new fire engine for its own and replace it with a clunker.

By 1927, LA officials were talking about filling in the canals and the lagoon to make room for parking, which they eventually did, preserving only a precious few waterways. And when oil was discovered in 1929, Venice lost the last bit of its old school dignity. Over the next few months the town went from a charming amusement capital to an oil boomtown with more than 140 wells packed in side-by-side, and by September of 1930 the Venice oil field was the state’s fourth largest. The aesthetic shift from beach paradise to industrial mess and the overall impact of the Great Depression hit amusement revenues even harder, but hope for Venice wasn’t yet lost. By the mid 1930s things were starting to look up a bit, due in part to an influx of workers from a nearby McDonald Douglas aircraft factory. Additionally, the piers stayed open through WWII (though not at night) and proved popular for sailors on leave, but in truth it was the old Venice’s last gasp. In 1946 the city refused to renew the Kinney Company’s lease on its pier, and an era was over.

The 1950s saw a small resurgence, but old Venice was all done. Drainage issues with sewage and garbage, runoff and environmental issues from the oil wells, and general decay had turned the canals into pits. The area was so ugly Orson Welles used it as the set for a forlorn border town in the 1958 movie, A Touch of Evil. Ray Bradbury noted the dreariness, writing that “Venice was and is full of lost places where people put up for sale the last worn bits of their souls, hoping no one will buy.”

Rather than step in and facilitate repair and redevelopment of the old neighborhoods, the City of Los Angeles chose instead to bulldoze more than 500 of the historic buildings, giving the area even more of a bombed-out appearance. Immigrants and artists moved into what was left and Venice’s modern chapter began. The Beat poets—Lawrence Lipton’s “Holy Barbarians,” with their Gas House and Venice West hangouts—and later the hippies and artists like The Doors made Venice the center of LA’s art and counterculture movements. Charles Bukowski worked at the Venice Post Office. Anais Nin’s friends drank and reminisced about her sunbathing nude here in the late 1940s. Gangs eventually appeared (the infamous Crips street gang was formed not far away) and Venice became dangerous, but the artistic and cultural successes brought renewed popular interest in the 1970s and 1980s. The Boardwalk, which runs through the area the piers used to dominate, is now as much a part of LA as the Sunset Strip. This is where Arnold Schwarzenegger used to work out, at the famed “Muscle Beach” outdoor gym. “This is the only place that I don’t feel out of place, because everyone here is out of place,” he once said of Venice.
It hasn’t changed that much in the last 30 years: A tan bodybuilder in a pink thong playing electric guitar on roller skates; the guy who hammers nails up his nose and dances on broken glass; the woman covered in tinfoil selling expired wall calendars and barking about aliens… Even the city’s website acknowledges that the three miles of sand along the Pacific are not what attracts visitors, offering: “You go to Venice… to gawk.”

Modern Venice is still rough around the edges—“Where Art Meets Crime” is a popular slogan on local T-shirts—but gastropubs, galleries and new housing exist right alongside fortunetellers and babbling self-styled prophets. As architect Antoine Predock, who built a notable beach house in Venice in 1991, observed: “It’s a fault line where the flotsam and energy that washes up from the Pacific collides with all of urban America crashing in from the other direction.”
In a word: Absurd.

Jeffrey Stanton’s book Venice California: Coney Island of the Pacific, and Venice California by Carolyn Elayne Alexander were invaluable sources for this article.