The Other Venice

Julia Roberts, Frank Gehry and the rise, fall, rise, fall, and rise again of LA's charmingly bohemian canal town on the Pacific.

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A hot Southern California day, so light-struck that even the traffic lights are drained of color, Lincoln Boulevard slogs along from Santa Monica toward LAX with a garish blight of strip malls and discount tire stores that in no way suggest the presence of the cool, blue Pacific Ocean just eight blocks away--much less the residence of Julia Roberts, which is, as it happens, within shouting distance. This is Venice, a peculiar, arguably fascinating sub-city of Los Angeles where juxtaposing the bad and the beautiful--a game Hollywood is the master of--takes on literally concrete meaning.

Stand along Lincoln or on a corner in the neighborhood popularly known as "the 'hood" because of its visiting and resident crackheads and gang-bangers and you can find yourself recalling the scene from the great '30s screwball affair My Man Godfrey, in which Carole Lombard, playing a lovable rich ditz on a society ball scavenger hunt, looks around the dump she's come to in search of a hobo and says, "Could you tell me why you live in a place like this when there are so many other nice places?"

Well, ask Roberts. Or John Cusack. Or Eric Clapton. Or Perry Farrell. Or Matt Groening. Or L.A.'s most celebrated celebrity of the moment, Walt Disney Concert Hall architect Frank Gehry. The big difference, of course, is that when Lombard obliviously posed the question in Godfrey, it was absurd and hence funny. The stars and sub-luminaries who call Venice home consider it a reasonable query. The people who love Venice love it irrationally. They find it "charming," "full of character," "relaxed," "sui generis," "interesting," "unique"--there's a string of adjectives that chills the blood of someone who lives without regret in the lovely ghetto of Brentwood.

But irrational emotion steadfastly adhered to over time can have a transforming effect on reality, and Venice, which has been a neighborhood in transition ever since it was created as a planned community/resort at the start of the 20th century, is now more like its adoring denizens imagine it than it's been since it was first invented. As it approaches its hundredth anniversary, Venice remains a whiplash mix of cheerfully brainless beach life, bizarre street life, churning bohemian life (part time-warp hippie, part poseur, part high artistic merit), hip nightlife and plain old everyday family life. But in the latest stage of a movement that's been under way at various speeds for decades, it is now in high-speed morph mode with a fresh wave of undauntedly trendy commercial life and skyrocketing real-estate values. And Hollywood is at the forefront of the latest surge, providing cash that's turning the industrial and commercial space into production houses and renovating the early-century cottages into two-story Craftsman gems, and lending cachet by participating to a greater degree than ever before at the celebrity level.

It's obviously no longer just longtime Venice citizen Dennis Hopper opting for the un-Beverly-Hills-like atmosphere of the place. People who live near John Cusack affectionately note how in sync he is with the backwater-of-California-coastal-culture of Venice when he leaves his Cadillac parked on the street with the top down for extended periods to pick up a windshieldful of parking tickets while he's apparently out of town, off shooting a movie, maybe.

The center of the transformation of Venice, and the place where the area's fate will show its ultimate character, is Abbot Kinney Boulevard, a dozen or so blocks that run diagonally across from Lincoln Boulevard to just short of the Ocean Front Walk area, where a crush of skin-, muscle-and/or breast-baring exhibitionists, skaters, gawkers and proudly weird people holds forth from mid-morning on. The high-low spectrum of cafes, shops and sidewalk bazaar spots that prompts the scene on the parallel paths of Ocean Front Walk and Main Street constitutes the expected part of Venice. Those either too hip to drop money at L.A.'s more conventional money-dropping locations or possessed of too many tattoos and/or piercings to know exactly where those places are traditionally hang here. Abbot Kinney is inland, aslant and more purely the Venice of true Venetians (as opposed to beachy Venusians). Celebrities are regularly sighted on Abbot Kinney, but it's unlikely even ex-Venice-homeowner Jim Carrey ever ventured into the beach scene, and he once married Lauren Holly.

During the day Abbot Kinney is a sun-baked, visually uneven commercial strip, interspersed--like all of Venice-- with a certain number of Craftsman cottages that have or have not been overhauled, an increasing number of spiffed-up contemporary architectural efforts of varying originality and success, and a fair number of crummy-looking places waiting for an optimistic person of imagination to take a stab on the final ascension of this location. With perverse Venetian logic, one of these crummier-looking places, the anti-Starbucks sandwich/coffee hangout Abbot's Habit, is the favorite of locals. With another kind of perverse logic, one of the most successful establishments--a decorator paradise of 100-times-the-original-flea-market-purchase-price items called Bountiful--has no sign announcing its presence.

One of the venerable junk shops is still on the boulevard, but mostly higher-end operations--places like Daisy Arts, a New York purveyor of imported Italian leather notebooks, stationery, glass, etc. and Sunya Currie, an Asian-influenced lifestyle-accessories store that features the distinctive jewelry of its namesake, and several furniture/objets outfits of mid-century or global-culture feel--have replaced funkier stores that couldn't handle the gigantic rent hikes of the last couple of years. With the upgrade in store quality there's been an increase in spenders from Westside high-end neighborhoods like Pacific Palisades and Santa Monica. What these people would really like, of course, is a Starbucks or at least a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf to offer somewhere for them to get their bearings and feel at home while exploring Abbot Kinney's quirks. Longtime residents see red at the thought, and even those who could buy mansions in Brentwood if they so desired shudder at the prospect of Brand America taking over.

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