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.
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.
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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