What Makes Venice Beach Unique

Venice Beach Introduction Originally founded in 1905 by a tobacco businessman, Venice, California, was an independent city until 1925 when it merged with Los Angeles. Today, it is known for its beach boardwalk and its circus-like atmosphere, and in the past decade Venice has undergone a process of gentrification like many other cities across the U.S. (Abcarian). However, Venice Beach was for years a center of the arts.

In the 1960s it was ground zero for the counter-culture movement, with musicians like Jim Morrison and the Doors getting their start at Venice Beach. It was home to late R&B musician Teena Marie, now forever memorialized in a Venice mural (Argonaut). It was the home of Muscle Beach, boardwalk roller skating, diversity and cultural foods.

It was home to Oakwood African Americans, who helped dig the canals of Venice but who were not permitted to settle along them and instead were placed inland on the one square mile of roads known as Oakwood—which today is now threatened by the expansion of Silicon Valley and the influx of gangs (Carroll).

Venice Beach was a popular resort—a place that brought tourists in from around the world, people who came for the beach sunsets, the shops and tattoo parlors and artists selling their art work right on the streets. It was a place full of culture and history and life and stories.

Today it has gone the way of most other cities that have had pasts: today, it is entering into a new phase of existence—a new stage of life that is disconnected from the past, that has more to do with avocado toast, Millennials and the gentrified tastes of those spilling over from Silicon Valley than it does with hippies, dancing, roller skating or the doors of perception. This paper will describe the history of Venice Beach and how it has changed over time.

The Beginning The canals of the Venice of America were originally dug to drain the area of the marshes that kept the land uninhabitable. Abbot Kinney, who founded the city, constructed a large pier, more than a thousand feet long, that included a ship style restaurant, an auditorium and a dance hall. Venetian architecture studded the business street, and tourists took a miniature railcar or a gondola down the various lanes of the Venice-inspired city. Kinney died in 1920 and the pier was destroyed by fire about that time.

Prohibition had also come into effect, which threatened the revenues of the city—but the Kinney family restored the pier and constructed new amusements for the people—roller coasters, a racing derby, a fun house and much more. It was a top-notch attraction for tourists year round (Stanton). It was generally a destination of innocent fun that fit right in with the culture of pre-1960s America. Americans were generally jubilant throughout the 1920s, depressed throughout the 1930s, energized by the 1940s, and exultant during the 1950s.

Transformation Venice in its original state did not last long. When Kinney died, the city essentially went up for grabs: its infrastructure was in need of repair and Prohibition had cut into its funds. Los Angeles annexed Venice in 1925 and the changes to its character began immediately. While designed to reflect the Venice of Italy with its canals, dug by the African Americans imported from New Orleans and now settled in Oakwood, Venice quickly took on a more status quo character as L.A.

did not want to pay the costs of upkeep. Many canals were filled in and paved over (a cheap solution to the problem of maintenance) and During the Great Depression, the city relied on oil derricks (oil had been discovered beneath the city streets) as its main source of revenue, and the site of so many oil wells also changed the face and character of the city once more. L.A.

did not pour a great deal of investment into Venice and by the time the 1950s arrived, it was generally regarded as the “Slum by the Sea”—not a very flattering name in mid-century America (Maynard). Yet, a decade later, there would be a kind of Bohemian allure about the Slum by the Sea—an allure that would attract the off-the-beaten path types, the artists, those interested in American subculture, counter-culture, and revolutionary change.

The Beat Generation occupied the Venice West Café and the region became synonymous with poets, artists, beatniks, and musicians interested in the new wave of pop music culture springing up as a kind of cultural protest to the politics of the era, Vietnam, and a general rejection of Old World values (Maynard). The Arrival of the Counter-Culture By the 1960s, the times and the culture had indeed changed.

The Feminist Movement got underway with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, in which she “came to political consciousness out of a disillusionment with her life as a suburban housewife” (Horowitz 2). The political consciousness of many others would be roused during the 1960s as well. The assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK, Jr., and Malcolm X stunned an entire generation of Americans in the 1960s: many were angered, frustrated, and ready to fight the government in any way they could.

The Vietnam War and the protests against government corruption were growing. Rock ‘n’ Roll had gotten underway with Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, The Beatles, and others, and life in general appeared to be in a period of immense and revolutionary fluctuation. In one way, Venice Beach was the epicenter of this transformation as it reflected the changing culture, changing tastes, and changing demographics of the nation.

The diversity of people, of ethnic foods, of arts, and of entertainments made Venice Beach in the 1960s one of the most famous and popular places in the country. When Jim Morrison arrived with The Doors, it represented a cultural shift that would redefine America for the rest of the 20th century. The Doors formed in Venice Beach in 1965 and went on to lead the counter-culture movement for the Rock ‘n’ Roll generation of the latter half of the 1960s.

They embraced the drug culture, the anarchy culture, the protest culture, and the beatnik culture.

From the 1960s on, Venice Beach became culturally relevant again: it was no longer the pristine innocence that Kinney originally planned in 1905, but it was something unique that offered Americans a place to go to get away from the established order, the status quo, the general way of life that went on without batting an eye at the murder of John Kennedy in 1963 or the murder of his brother Robert in 1968 or of Martin Luther King that same year or of Malcolm X in 1965.

Venice Beach was like a refuge from the turmoil and tragedy: it was a place where youth culture was taking shape, where artists could express themselves and find community. Thus other musicians like Teena Marie called Venice Beach home. Street performers took over when the music of the counter-culture era faded into the mainstream of the 1980s and the rebellious counter-culture went into punk on the East Coast.

Venice became home to the chainsaw jugglers, the acrobats and the comedians who took to Venice Beach the same way carnies took to side shows and carnivals. They were spillovers in their own way from Muscle Beach, which had come into its own in the 1950s. Muscle Beach became famous for its body builders and acrobats and gymnasts. It represented a culture of its own—one that emphasized physical fitness and performance.

It was a stark contrast to the decadent and often destructive culture that The Doors represented—and yet the cultures grew up side by side one another in Venice, the most eclectic of American cities. Venice attracted immigrants, performers, artists, musicians, poets, painters, chefs, and people just looking for something off the beaten path.

Venice Today Venice Beach still retains much of its eccentricities of former decades, and it also still retains its washed-out, bleached-out visual appeal, which provided a certain aesthetic that directors sought in the 1990s to convey the bleak and pessimistic yet sunny and bright atmospheric look they desired. Thus, Venice Beach was used for several Hollywood films throughout the final decade of the 20th century, including Oliver Stone’s The Doors in 1991, White Men Can’t Jump in 1992, Falling Down in 1993, Speed in 1994, and American History X in 1998.

Today, Venice Beach is still recognized for its eclectic charms, but it is also in the process of losing part of itself, its heritage and its culture once more, just as it did the first time in the 1920s when it was annexed by Los Angeles, neglected and allowed to become rundown.

However, today, instead of being rundown it is being revitalized in the same status quo manner as other cities across America—revitalized for the moneyed classes so that they can flock to the city and bring in investment and tax revenue.

The diversity, charm and ethnic cultures that defined it from the 1950s onward have dwindled, and even the African Americans of Oakwood—the original population that helped dig the canals and construct Venice of California are leaving their community for other shores as the upper class white collar workers of Silicon Valley move in. Conclusion Venice Beach started off as a kind of ode to the most architecturally stunning and iconic city in the world: Venice, Italy. Kinney had a dream to bring the Renaissance.