The Other Venice

By night, Abbot Kinney comes alive with a different face. Restaurants like Joe's, Lilly's French Café, Primitivo and Capri bring in attractive, cash-wielding outsiders who confer an air of well-being on the boulevard and leave no doubt that there is a there here. Ditto Hal's Bar & Grill, which has a vibrant pick-up flavor. The Brig, which not long ago was a venerable biker hangout, is now a bar scene with major celebrity patronage. The nightlife of Abbot Kinney is a key to sustaining its day and ultimate life. Many of the customers who go to the new emporium of exotic scents, Strange Invisible Perfumes, located in one of the refurbished cottages along Abbot Kinney that have million-dollar asking prices on them, are friends and acquaintances of the owner, who, being producer Jerry Bruckheimer's capable stepdaughter, has lots of friends and acquaintances. But many are people whose first visit to Abbot Kinney was at night, to one of the bars or restaurants.

The first step in transforming Abbot Kinney from scruffy fun for locals to near-sophistication came decades ago with that favorite Hollywood makeover tactic: a name change. Originally no one could find the street because it was one of many called Washington this or that. It was a small stroke of genius to name it Abbot Kinney, because the name has a nice sing-song beat to it that sticks in the brain and because Abbot Kinney sounds like the name of one or two people of importance. It was one person, actually. Abbot Kinney invented Venice in 1905 out of marshland with a fortune gained originally from cornering the Turkish tobacco market and acted out his Hollywood-like dream of a popular American Venice for 15 years before dying of lung cancer.

It was some dream. Kinney, who'd circled the globe, loved Venice, Italy. So in Southern California, he had a lagoon and canals dug for gondolas to cruise and constructed imitation Venetian buildings, then built piers for carousels and Ferris wheels, had a trolley line brought out from downtown, installed a miniature railroad to transport seaside revelers around, and even built a gigantic salt water pool called the "plunge," which was half heated and half sea temperature. When two massive storms took out the pier and savaged the shore just before the new Venice was to open, Kinney simply rebuilt at a breakneck speed. Since engineering was not, it seems, his ultimate strong suit--the canals were prone to becoming mosquito nurseries--his resilience was fortunate.

A glance at Venice history makes it seem as if there was always at least one pier on fire. Nevertheless, Venice was a grand notion that met with grand success. It was a residential theme park with a resort economy, great weather and a lively edge of honky-tonk. It was also a tolerant place, or at least a place where what wasn't so tolerable got lost in the sunshine and the din. (Kinney himself, after having many children with his wife, losing a number of them to childhood disease and having more, left her to die alone at 46 while he lived in Santa Monica with his mistress, who gave him two more children.)

True to the nature of its founder, Venice forged ahead over the 20th century, surviving catastrophes--storms, fires, the Depression, Prohibition, World War II, Jim Morrison and friends--without ever recovering the grandeur of its origins but never losing its identity, either, despite being annexed by Los Angeles and having its lagoon and many canals filled in. Modern Venice began in the late '70s and early '80s when, in the wake of the wealthier Santa Monica, it began to upgrade its own Main Street and to make something of the art scene which its very seaminess--not to mention cheap square footage--had long fostered. The Venice that spawned extreme skateboarding with its abandoned curves of concrete, documented so entertainingly in the film Dogtown and Z-Boys, took on a character that was something more than quaint, quirky or even quintessentially beachy.

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