Los Angeles Venice: Boardwalk, Street Performers and Abbot Kinney

Venice is Los Angeles at its most theatrical — a beachfront neighbourhood south of Santa Monica that has been staging the most extravagant daily performance of Californian self-invention since the eccentric developer Abbot Kinney created a canal-based resort town in 1905 and named it after the Italian original he was attempting to replicate in southern California. The Venice Boardwalk, running for 3 kilometres along the Pacific, operates daily as an outdoor theatre of bodybuilders at Muscle Beach, skateboarders at the skate park, street performers, fortune tellers, cannabis vendors (legal in California since 2016), and the homeless population that has made the beach's northern end one of the most visible and most politically contested encampments in Los Angeles County. It is, in other words, a place where Los Angeles's contradictions are performed in public without apology.

Abbot Kinney Boulevard, running inland from the beach, is Venice's design and restaurant corridor — a kilometre of boutiques, art galleries, restaurants, and the specialty retail that Los Angeles's most affluent creative residents support. The street has evolved from its earlier bohemian character into something considerably more expensive without losing the specific aesthetic DNA that made it worth visiting: the architecture of the shops remains architectural (converted bungalows, industrial buildings, and new construction by significant LA architects), the restaurants include some of the city's finest (Felix for Neapolitan pizza, Gjusta as the most influential bakery and deli in Southern California, Gjelina as the template for the genre of quality neighbourhood restaurant that has spread across LA), and the galleries maintain programming that treats Venice as a genuine art neighbourhood rather than a tourist gift shop.

The canal system that Abbot Kinney originally built — and that had been converted to streets in 1929 — was restored in 1992 to approximately its original form: the three remaining Venice canals, accessed from Dell Avenue, are lined with bungalows, ducks, and the specific tranquility that water introduces into any urban environment. Walking the canal paths on a weekend morning — past the houseboats and the morning gardeners and the egrets fishing in the shallows — provides the most complete experience of what Kinney was actually imagining when he built his Southern California Venice: a domestic canal city for middle-class Californians who wanted Europe's ancient pleasures delivered by the Pacific coast's magnificent light.