COVER STORY : Venice’s Wild Ride : Quirky Community Considers Another Sea Change in Its Tumultuous Existence

Venice draws life from poets and performers, bodybuilders and bohemians, but the seaside community owes its existence to a coin toss.

Ninety years ago, Abbot Kinney, a tobacco tycoon and budding Los Angeles land developer, lost confidence in his Westside business partners.

In what is now south Santa Monica, the partners had developed a commercial district and pioneered the Southland’s first successful amusement business--the Ocean Park Amusement Pier. But Kinney felt stymied by his associates’ unwillingness to support his more grandiose plans.

So after months of bickering, Kinney and his fellow officers of the Ocean Park Development Co. sat down in January of 1904 and flipped a coin to divide their holdings. Kinney won the toss and--to the shock of his partners--chose to take control of a 1.5-mile stretch of salt marshes south of Navy Street instead of the far more valuable developed Ocean Park land.

In the coastal dunes and wetlands, Kinney saw the potential for a new Pacific city of Old World charm. Using his own money, the canny entrepreneur built Venice of America within 19 months, a resort community of canals and gondolas, of pavilions and cafes that soon rivaled Ocean Park and its pier. Wild rides and sideshows soon followed.

“Imagine,” said 83-year-old Al Arnold, who has lived in the same Venice house near the oceanfront for 77 years. “When you got to the beach, you found spectacular rides--heart-stoppers--dance halls, a gigantic indoor saltwater plunge, two roller coasters, fun houses. It was a regular circus.”

It was a stunning creation that transformed an idle backwater into one of the world’s largest entertainment playgrounds and set the tone for a community that to this day has continued to reinvent itself. For 90 years, waves of builders, hustlers, dreamers, vaudevillians, poets and promoters have washed through the community, creating a place that has thrived on all creeds and attitudes, celebrated the sublime and worshiped the ridiculous.

As present-day Venice agonizes over plans to renovate its popular oceanfront boardwalk, those with long local histories may feel more than a small sense of deja vu. The most publicized proposal, calling for brick paving, antique lighting, designated performance areas and more, is backed by merchants and property owners concerned about competition from Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, the Universal CityWalk and Pasadena’s Old Town district.

The plan has stirred strong opposition from many residents, activists and street performers concerned that commercially driven renovation might stifle the boardwalk’s freewheeling spirit. They have offered an alternative plan.

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The renovation efforts can hardly be considered novel. Venice is very much the product of self-promotion. In its early years, the community constantly made and remade itself, locked in a struggle with competing attractions.

That’s why, for some, the prospect of a modern day make-over sounds familiar.

“In a way, the (commercial) ghosts of the past have come back to haunt Venice and kept alive this constant struggle for definition,” said Elayne Alexander, an archivist and historian at the Venice Historical Society. “Nothing’s really changed.”

Venice, to be sure, has not always been given to promotional campaigns. In recent decades, in fact, its appeal has been largely laissez-faire, as a quirky anything-goes outpost for the Beats in the 1950s, hippies in the 1960s and ‘70s and New Agers now.

But under Kinney, the making and remaking of Venice was nothing if not deliberate--and always commercially driven. Using massive amounts of daring and showmanship, he created Venice of America, a sort of precursor to Disneyland, and lured the public away from the Ocean Park Amusement Pier owned by his former partners.

Jeffrey Stanton, a local Venice historian, in his book “Venice, California--Coney Island of the Pacific,” has meticulously documented the struggle that followed between Kinney and the other real estate interests seeking to develop the beachfront.

Kinney and his competitors anchored their resort communities with amusement piers and warred against each other for the attention of immigrants hungry for entertainment. Overnight, the coast from Redondo Beach to Santa Monica mushroomed into an entertainment complex, jam-packed with wharves, mind-boggling rides, international restaurants and carny concessions.

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During the highly competitive period of 1903-1920, Kinney, the Doge of Venice, reigned supreme over the growing amusement park scene. His Venice of America was the crown jewel of the oceanfront, or as one vintage postcard series of photos proclaimed, “The Capitol of Joyland.”

Santa Monica Bay’s pristine beaches had become accessible to the general public in 1877 thanks to a growing network of rail lines emanating out across the Los Angeles Basin from Pasadena, the Santa Fe Railway’s most westerly passenger terminus. Los Angeles residents, beckoned by the cheap fares, flocked to the ocean on weekends and during the summer tourist season.

Said Al Arnold’s 89-year-old brother Arch: “People came from all over, riding the Pacific Electric’s Red Cars. They were hanging out the windows like they were on their way to the Promised Land. Kinney even had a monkey farm on the end of the pier, an aquarium full of seals and sea lions. Venice was quite the place. There was something for everyone.”

Kinney had as his centerpiece the startling Midway Plaisance. Located alongside the Venice Grand Lagoon (now the Venice traffic circle), it was a collection of amusements that included camel rides, freak shows and foreign exhibits from the attendance-breaking 1906 Columbian Exposition in St. Louis.

His nearest competitors--former partners Alexander Fraser, G.M. Jones and H.R. Gage--were able to make life hard for Kinney’s enterprise. As bosses of the Ocean Park section of Santa Monica, which had jurisdiction over Kinney’s property, they used their influence to delay his building permits, limit his business hours and block his requests for public services.

Their tactics, however, only strengthened Kinney’s desire to win Venice’s independence from Ocean Park.

He counterattacked by adding more attractions to his pier--animal exhibits, a ballroom and special events, including a performance featuring actress Sarah Bernhardt. He doubled the size of his Ship Cafe (shaped like a boat), and began construction on an indoor hot saltwater plunge just west of the property now occupied by the Sidewalk Cafe.

The Ocean Park powers forbade Kinney to complete the plunge (it was in competition with Ocean Park’s Bath House) and scheduled the illegally constructed building foundations to be dynamited on June 10, 1907.

That morning, Kinney’s wife, Margaret, mobilized the “Pick & Shovel” civic club and staged a sit-in with 200 women and children who picnicked atop the foundations. By noon the dynamiters had departed. Kinney pressed on with his plans and the plunge opened June 21, 1908. On peak days, it accommodated 2,000 bathers and required 11 lifeguards.

“We’d go in the back door, ‘bargain prices’ it was called,” said Liz Howland Smith, 68, a lifelong Venice resident who spent many days at the plunge as a youth. “We didn’t use their towels or their showers. We wore scratchy wool bathing suits with buttons down the front, rubber caps. The old people would sit next to the fountain where the hot water came out. It was, when you look back at it, all very therapeutic.”

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Soon after, Kinney quickened his promotional pace, adding an aquarium on his amusement pier that historian Stanton says contained “the finest collection of marine specimens on the West Coast.” Kinney had the “Venice Scenic Railroad” built alongside Ocean Front Walk, a ride that took a roller coaster-style journey with a brakeman aboard.

In January, 1911, he installed a Ferris wheel--the first on the West Coast--purchased from the Seattle-Yukon Exposition. On Zephyr Street, alongside Ocean Front Walk, promoters opened a “Captive Balloon Ride,” a hydrogen-filled balloon tethered to a 1,400-foot-long cable. In March, the “Merry Widow” opened, a ride of tilting, swirling cups. And soon after, at the entrance to his pier, a water ride was installed. Called the “Rapids,” it was immediately inundated by a public eager to be tumbled for fun.

On May 29, 1911, Abbot Kinney’s Italian-style, canal-lined real estate development finally became the city of Venice. Venetian voters approved Kinney’s cityhood proposal, ending his six-year-long struggle to transform his Italian dream into an American reality. Cityhood gave Kinney the freedom to compete more creatively and with less interference.

But Kinney’s competition did not rest. On June 17, 1911, Fraser and his Ocean Park partners, eager to counter Kinney’s growing success, opened their new 1,250-foot-long Million Dollar Pier in Ocean Park.

Its showpiece was the “Grand Canyon Electric Railroad,” which ran out over the water along the end of the pier. In the middle of the pier stood a 135-foot-tall mountain covered with electric lights that at night looked like an exploding volcano. Fraser’s pier had a revolving cafe, a dance hall, ice cream parlors and numerous attractions, including a futuristic exhibit of incubators for newborns.

It also had a Crooked House, a maze-like structure that Stanton says was an “early fun house.” Near the Ocean Park Amusement Pier, Frazer installed an Auto Maze ride, a forerunner of bumper cars.

Margaret Kinney died on June 30, 1911, six years to the day after she had turned on the electric lights of her husband’s Venice of America development. Five days later, on the Fourth of July, Kinney opened the world’s largest roller coaster, “Race Thru the Clouds,” which became the ride sensation of the season.

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Then tragedy struck the rival pier to the north: On Sept. 3, 1912, Fraser’s Million Dollar Pier caught fire and burned to the ground. Young children, trapped and confused in the Crooked House, perished in the fire.

Yet Ocean Park bounced back from the tragedy, outlining plans to rebuild a fire-proof cement pier by 1913. And the promotions and counter-promotions continued, with Kinney and his competitors using every imaginable ploy to get people to take the trolley to the beach.

In 1913, the city of Venice fielded a baseball team that played in the major leagues for three years. Soon after, the Grand Prix road race was created, running along the Venice Speedway to Playa del Rey and back.

And Mack Sennett’s Keystone Film Co. began holding bathing beauty parades along the Venice oceanfront.

The pier was a very lively place, said Al Arnold. “People were gamblin’ on the . . . floors of the Ship’s Cafe, diving off the pier for money, getting married in the sea. The scene in Venice was known (everywhere). And I should know, I worked in the merchant marine and saw the enthusiasm for Venice worldwide.”

After years of spectacular success that saw the rebuilding of Fraser’s pier, expansion of Abbot Kinney’s pier, Hindu fakirs, sword swallowers, operas and electric trams, the oceanfront complex finally started to show some cracks.

On Nov. 4, 1920, Abbot Kinney died of lung cancer. Six weeks later, the Kinney pier, with all of its innumerable attractions, was destroyed by fire.

“I can remember the night (it) burned down,” said 83-year-old Frank Watson, a Venice native and resident. “We lived on Indiana, and went down to the oceanfront at Brooks Avenue to watch. I can still hear the seals screaming. It was a quarter of a mile away. They were in a big tank and the water began to boil. Burning embers were falling in the water, hissing. It was awful.”

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For Venice, it had been a long, strange ride, from being the rage to almost being razed. After Kinney died, the city, long plagued by problems of canal water circulation, Santa Monica sewage runoff and beachfront pollution, chose annexation in 1925 with the city of Los Angeles as a solution to its problems.

Some saw the move as the beginning of the community’s downfall.

“Everyone hoped annexation would solve the problems but the city of L.A. did nothing to help,” Watson said. “They filled in the canals, which caused still other problems; and those they didn’t fill in, they abandoned.”

Today, Venice’s Ocean Front Walk stands as one of the Southland’s most popular tourist destinations, attracting more than 3 million visitors annually. But recent years have proved unsettling. A lingering recession has frayed nerves among oceanfront merchants and street performers. Gang fights and drug dealing have upset residents. And rival attractions in the Los Angeles area have posed intense competition.

It is against this backdrop that the community is debating plans for another make-over, which would be financed with $10 million in park bond funds approved by voters in 1992.

Arch Arnold speculated on what Kinney would have done: “Why not build something that will generate income, like a roller coaster? A dance hall would still be a hell of an attraction.”