Venice Beach LA
Come to Venice Beach on a sunny weekend afternoon and you’ll find a pretty lively scene. Along the Ocean Front Walk, also called the Venice Boardwalk, jugglers and acrobats, tarot readers and Mad Hatter headwear vendors, jug-band musicians and political types circulating petitions to decriminalize marijuana all compete frantically for your attention. If voyeurism is more your style, sit back and watch bikini-clad women watching body builders watching themselves flex at Muscle Beach.

It wasn’t always thus: in 1900, the stretch of coastline where Venice lies today was nothing but depressing swamp. It was just the kind of place developer and tobacco millionaire Abbot Kinney was looking for to build his own little Italy. Where ordinary folk saw sludge, Kinney saw a pseudo-Venice, complete with canals, gondolas, theatres and music halls. Kinney drained the swamp and dug a 26km-long (16mi) network of canals, around which he built a small city. As a finishing touch he had a dozen gondoliers brought from Europe to pole through his shiny new paradise.

On 4 July 1905, Kinney presided over a grand opening more glamorous than LA had seen before. Twenty years later, with Kinney five years in his grave, all but three of the canals had been paved over and Kinney’s city of culture had become a den of vice. LA wasn’t interested in edification – just like today, it wanted entertainment. Over the 1920s and 30s, Venice disintegrated into a community of speak-easies, protection rackets and gambling halls.

Kinney may have been a little kooky, but he unwittingly set the trend for the Venice of the future. Throughout most of the 20th century, Venice has attracted whatever was the counterculture of its decade, be it the 50s Beat generation, the hippies of the 60s or the New Agers of the 70s and 80s. Venice is the place that generates the image of the free-wheeling, laid-back, slightly crazed but creative and cutting-edge city that many people expect LA to be.

Architecturally, Venice is often as bizarre as its boardwalk. Look no farther than the four-story binoculars, the work of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, posing as the front door to the Chiat/Day advertising agency. There are also scores of colourful street murals, a reminder of the preponderance of artists (some quite well-known, most struggling and bohemian) who live here.