Venice, Los Angeles, California

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Image:Venice.jpg

Venice, California, 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 code is 310 and its ZIP Code is 90291.

Contents

History

The Venice of America was founded by Abbot Kinney in 1905, and it was annexed to Los Angeles in 1925. (There have been several movements to secede from Los Angeles since then, including currently.) 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.

Image:Los Angeles Venice2.jpg Venice is remarkable for a number of innovations. 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.

Venice and neighboring Santa Monica were host for a decade to an amusement and pleasure-pier called Pacific Ocean Park, or POP by locals. The facility experienced declining attendance in the mid-60s due to increasing competition from other newer parks in Southern California such as Disneyland, Knott's Berry Farm, Busch Gardens, and Marineland, and it was torn down to make way for a large residential building complex. 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, 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, 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. 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.

Image:Ballerina Clown by Jonathon Borofsky.jpg

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. 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 Angelica Huston, actor Nicolas Cage and musician John Lydon (who owns a sizeable amount of rental property in Venice). 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 Street in Venice where he plans to break ground on and build his new personal residence in August 2005. 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 and Rutger Hauer, and film directors Henry Jaglom and Paul Mazursky. For many years Hulk Hogan was 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.

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 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, including Venice High School, which is actually in the neighborhood of Mar Vista.

Venice in the media

Image:Venice Beach.jpg 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

External links

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