The Other Venice

The Greed Decade was great for the art market--prices shot up because money was plentiful, the definition of art was broader and nobody worried too much about buying the Emperor's New Clothes. Venice had artists like Laddie John Dill, Billy Al Bengston, Joe Goode and Chuck Arnoldi coming into full prominence and galleries like L.A. Louver that made it seem Venice might become L.A.'s new artistic center of gravity. For a few years, Venice threatened to become L.A.'s newest upscale neighborhood. A building frenzy went on--high-end condos along the beach and south toward Marina del Rey, new commercial structures near Main Street housing trend-setting outfits like the advertising agency TBWAChiatDay and groovy restaurants like 72 Market Street, which Venice boosters Dudley Moore and producer Tony Bill partnered on. Venice particularly became the scene of daring, small-scale architecture, often of industrial-looking materials that defied domestic prettiness with clean utilitarian geometry. Dennis Hopper lives to this day in one of them on a street that's still spotted with unredeemably boring, cheap apartment buildings. One of the most significant examples of Venice's architectural boom in the '80s is the now-famous Frank Gehry-designed beach house that resembles, one imagines, the way the Tin Man might appear to himself in a mirror on acid.

When L.A.'s real estate bubble burst after the recession of the late '80s/early '90s, the Venetian renaissance hit a wall. A lot of people who'd bought into the area, many of them Hollywood managers, agents, executives and lawyers who liked the fresh air and groovy vibe, got stuck there as the market fell, the canals got dirtier, and gunshots and muggings became more common than gallery openings. The "civil unrest" of '92 was not a recommendation for living on the edge of anything, even the ocean, unless you were in the Malibu Colony.

The Internet boom, not yet a bubble, briefly refreshed the area. It was the kind of inherently young, edgy, individualistic phenomenon that valued the offbeat cool of Venice as much as the cool air and cooled-off real estate. For a few years, during which Sandra Bullock played an improbably lonely techno-nerd with a Venice pad in The Net, websites were getting designed faster than anything else south of Rose Avenue, the border between Venice and Santa Monica, and at the Rose Cafe you could see bleary-eyed college grads mentally calculating their stock options over double lattes.

Not long ago, Gehry, who lived for years in Santa Monica, snagged the last great lot in Venice, which was actually four lots joined together on a corner south of Venice Boulevard that collectively cost a pretty penny. What he builds for himself there will be a source of vital fascination. But there are so many other signals of the long-awaited arrival of Venice that not many people have even realized Gehry's buy. All along the fresh, clean canals, million-dollar-plus homes in a glut of styles from Gehry-derivative to L.A. Tuscan have gone up over the past few years. New loft-like structures specially zoned for artists to live and work in dot Abbot Kinney (the actress Jane Seymour lives elsewhere, but is rumored to have bought one to paint in). People who work in Hollywood as writers, directors, graphic artists, etc., have bought up either the Craftsman gems or the sort of building they can hire one of the area's gifted architects to transform into what has emerged as a new kind of skinny, classic-modern, light-filled Venice home.

Venice's identity as an artistically adventuresome, liberal-thinking community is publicly demonstrated each year with the Venice Art Walk, now almost a quarter century old, and the Venice Garden Tour, not quite half that old. Both events are hugely successful charity fundraisers for local organizations serving the large number of needy people in Venice, who may be needing a new community if rents and property values keep going up at their current spiraling rates. Less successful artists can no longer afford Venice, but there are lots of people under the top tier of the now grand old men Arnoldi, Bengston and Dill, and they regularly open their doors to the huge number of those willing to pay for the privilege of dropping in. The newer but already beloved Garden Tour, which benefits the Neighborhood Youth Association, was organized partly by Venice landscape architect Jay Griffith, whose own property speaks wonders about how great Venice can look if you practice tunnel vision and keep the faith that the rest of block will get it together soon. Griffith's design aesthetic has been exercised so extensively around Venice that it's almost the defining style. It's highly sculptural with an underlying Asian feel, a love of grasses and agave, a way with water, and an aversion to flowers.

With Hollywood's help, Venice may well resolve its multiple-personality disorder to the point where an agreeable public face emerges as its poster child. Like Julia Roberts, if she hasn't sold at a profit by the time you read this. The good old days of the poetry scene at Venice's beloved Beyond Baroque need not be extinguished, but nobody really wants to live next door to a drunk like Charles Bukowski. It isn't great for anything but film history that Orson Welles was able to pass off downtown Venice as a seedy Mexican border town in 1958's Touch of Evil. Much better to think of cutie Josh Hartnett and icon Harrison Ford romping through the canals in Hollywood Homicide. Those who hold the traditions of Venice dear may decry the ongoing sell-out, but for those who realize that Variety readers are more likely than William Burroughs fans to paint their bungalows, it can't happen fast enough.

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