Posts tagged "Venice Beach"
Venice in America
Visitors to Venice Beach, California, today are more likely to think of early-'80s roller skaters from Xanadu than Venice, Italy. Three quarters of a century before, however, Abbot Kinney's vision brought a piece of Italy to the Pacific coast in Los Angeles. Replete with gondoliers and Renaissance-style architecture, Kinney's Venice, as American Tourism contributor J. Philip Gruen demonstrates, was a short-lived cultural experiment that nevertheless set the tone for one of L.A.'s quirkiest neighborhoods. Apart from the Venice Canal Historic District, little of the Venetian influence tempers the sun-drenched stretch of trinket shops and vendor stands. A close inspection turns up the occasional nod to the city on the Adriatic. Bits of the Colonnade have been salvaged, and St. Mark's Hotel's neighboring Italian Renaissance…
Tagged: architecture, imitation, tourism, travel, Venice Beach, visionaries
Venice Beach's Battle of the Boardwalk
Venice Beach is widely known for its carefree, bohemian air. Having enticed successive waves of Beats, hippies, punks, roller-derby fiends, and other nonconformists for decades, the funky Los Angeles neighborhood along the Pacific is among the inheritors of a long tradition of quirky enclaves in America: New York's Greenwich Village, New Orleans's French Quarter, San Francisco's North Beach and Haight-Ashbury, Cleveland's Coventry Village, Miami's Coconut Grove, and Atlanta's Little Five Points, to name but a few. This image is so pervasive that few can believe Venice had its origin as a master-planned residential community laced with gondola-plied canals that conjured its Italian namesake, as architectural historian Philip Gruen describes in American Tourism. Like other counterculture havens, Venice Beach became noted for the free-spirited joie…
Tagged: French Quarter, Los Angeles, New Orleans, regulation, social impact, tourism, travel, Venice Beach