Manhattan Beach and Venice: Namesakes and coin tosses

I AM OFTEN struck by how vastly different Venice and Manhattan Beach are from their namesakes. The car-less maze of canals and bridges in Italy doesn’t seem much like Venice, Calif. And the laid-back, cute town of Manhattan Beach seems to have little in common with bustling New York City.


But delving into the history of each Los Angeles County town sheds light on the connection to their namesakes thousands of miles away.


According to the Manhattan Beach Historical Society’s website, the town was the result of two public transportation systems coming together. One area was named Manhattan by its developer, Stewart Merrill, after his hometown on the east coast.


Venice, as we learned in class, was developed by Abbot Kinney. Before it became the T-shirt vendor-lined muscle beach of today, it was a cultural city modeled after Venezia, complete with its own gondolas on man-made canals.

Interestingly, the history of both Manhattan and Venice involved a coin toss: To determine town’s name Merrill won his coin toss against realtor George Peck, who wanted to name it Shore Acres. According to the Venice Historical Society's website, Kinney won a coin toss to determine which half of the oceanfront land he would purchase. He surprised the four other developers by choosing the barren, marshy property that is now Venice.


We’ve discussed how Pasadena was shaped by the Midwest roots of the people who settled there: several groups of people traveling across the country to re-create their home elsewhere. But, as with Manhattan Beach and Venice, the vision of one developer can bring a piece of another city to L.A. too.


– Emily Rome

Top photo: Manhattan Beach (Credit: Mr Bulitt / Wikimedia Commons)

Bottom photo: Venice (Credit: SameerKhan / Wikimedia Commons)

Genius Loci: MY LA

The Sony Water Tower, although no longer used for storing water,  has been an icon since it was built in 1937.
Taken from the top of the Sony parking structure off of Culver.
Photo credit: myself 

Venice Boardwalk.  The atmosphere is one of a kind.
Photo credit: myself 

Downtown Skyline. Taken while I was sitting in traffic on the 101. Its amazing how beautiful a place can look from far away and how something beautiful can come out of such a stressful situation (sitting in traffic). Thats is LA.

Photo credit: myself

The 405 at 11:00pm on a Wednesday night. That's my LA
Photo credit: myself

The LA Convention Center. The first place I ever saw a movie shot.  It is just like LA, so versatile that it can be transformed into anything you want it to be. I really hope they do not tear it down.
Photo credit: myself

An Island of Illusion

Venice Acrobats by Eddie Crimmins via Flickr

YOU CAN barely make it out—it’s cigarettes, covered by salty wind, sweat, fried food, and what’s that? Yep, it’s from the Kush Doctor. A woman in a red triangle bikini top and leopard printed G-string whizzes past you as the man wearing headphones with gigantic padding thrusts his newly recorded rap record before you as you walk in time with the crowd. Young boys run up and down the basketball court showing off their tan and the middle-aged couple wearing Velcro strapped sandals, khaki shorts that hover above their kneecaps, Hawaiian shirts and visors snap their camera that only reflects their freshly pink skin. Large men with engorging muscles squeezed into Speedos bench press as vendors sell fried food and hotdogs.  T-shirts that read “I love ketchup” and “Hello Titties” are sold with some more sensible accessories like margarita sunglasses.  Early twenties coeds walk their dogs and teenagers laugh at the shirtless, long haired dude holding the sign that says “Need Money for Penis Reduction” written in think purple calligraphy and toss him some leftover change. Certainly not quarters though, as they are a parking necessity. 

An island of misfit toys and forgotten dreams, the Venice Boardwalk is a place where you can put all normality aside and become anyone you want. 

Venice Beach by Glen Scarborough via Flickr

Lawrence Lipton’s essay, “Slum by the Sea” gave one of the most authentic descriptions of Venice through the people that inhabit this sea slum, “the poets…and the painters…The clowns, the make-believers, the self-deceivers—and the mad.”

Your imagination may come up with what you may think is something of insanity, however I can guarantee that the gray-haired, man and woman, half naked with skin wrinkled from endless amount of sun, rolling around in the sand are currently seeing crazier things. Venice is being trapped in a dream where you can fly.  It is the only place in the world where you can find a homeless man smiling. The characters that inhabit this mile and half rainbow road certainly prove that Venice is what you make of it.

You have two clear choices—either scoff in disgust or laugh hysterically at the absurdity.

-- Elise Fornaca

Coordinates: 620 Lincoln Boulevard

As it stands, 2010

THE FOX DISCOUNT DEPARTMENT  Store is quite a fancy name for what, in essence, is an indoor flea market. Technically, yes, it is a store, with different vendors establishing the departments, selling discount merchandise, so the name isn't entirely deceptive. But then there's that towering Fox sign, coupled with the peaked street-facing awning that suggests a former glory as a palace of cinematic dreams and memory.

In my early teens I found myself running with an older crowd. As our junior and senior high school orchestras were combined many of us seventh and eighth graders found ourselves sharing music stands with tenth and eleventh graders who were more than happy to bring us unto their world, and we were more than happy to follow. How could I resist? They had access to cars and could drive, and to be a fourteen-year-old tagging along on weeknight and weekend adventures beyond the easy bicycling confines of Culver City was like winning the lottery.

Many of those excursions led to 620 Lincoln Boulevard where I would pony up a dollar and fifty cents to see a double bill at what was the Fox Venice Theatre. In the days before cable and video-on-demand, before DVDs, before VCRs even, the only way to see an old movie was either by chance on TV or in second-run theatres like the Fox Venice where films were programmed into interesting combinations on a calendar. The bills changed daily and it wasn't unusual for the theatre to sell out its 900 seats on any given weeknight. Despite the glut of content all over the web today from streaming sights like Netflix I still occasionally discover films that I saw at the Fox Venice that as yet never made it to video or DVD.

1980 calendar. Every cool kid had one on his wall.

Back then, seeing the Fox Venice calendar in a rack at a music store, a bookstore, or better yet on the walls of a friend's bedroom, lent a cache of cultural cool to those establishments. There was an ad hoc, free-spirited, clinging hippie vibe in those silk-screened calendars, a beautiful chaos in those paste-up graphics that bespoke a love of the movies. The audiences were no less eclectic, consisting of college-age adults and cinephiles, nostalgic older adults banking the fires of their memories while feeding off the energies of a younger generation, and younger kids like myself who felt we were getting a peek into a non-conformist counter culture. Today the experience might derisively be viewed as a sort of hipster scene, but it was a scene outside the mainstream unironically beholden to the cast-offs of Hollywood's memory, a church dedicated to the art form removed from its commercial trappings.

Fading glory, 1968

It's difficult to look at this bland, blue-gray building and think this was the place where I encountered many firsts. It was where I saw my first R and X-rated movies – if the soft-core satire Flesh Gordon really counts as a true X-rated movie anymore. Watching a midnight show of the Jamaican gangster-biopic hybrid The Harder They Fall became a crash course in the burgeoning Rastafarian subculture, back in a day when theatres still had smoking sections and wouldn't think of insisting on only tobacco. Not that I smoked, not that the theatre could enforce their own policies, not that anyone cared that the auditorium glowed with the blue haze of marijuana illuminated by the light on the screen. This was where I saw David Bowie as The Man Who Fell to Earth, where Tod Browning introduced me to Freaks, where I saw Rocky Horror with the creators of audience participation... all before I was old enough to drive. The Fox Venice was where I saw my first foreign films and realized there were stories, real stories, that movies could tell, with ambiguous and not always happy endings.

These experiences were formative and not in the least minor. Prior to the Fox Venice I had a vague sense of wanting to work in movies, but it left me with a life-long questioning of what it meant to tell stories that were true. There was also a reverence that could be felt sitting in that mid-century modern auditorium, this idea that, as a young teen, I was accepted into an adult audience. No one asked me what I was doing there or thought it weird or made me feel as thought I couldn't appreciate what transpired on the screen.

Somewhere in the dark of the Fox Venice, amid the hormonal confusion and narrative dissonance, I lost my childhood innocence. There is a hazy image I have of an alien-looking band of musicians crowded on stage playing an odd arrangement of “Minnie the Moocher” as sung by the devil, the band wearing turbans like bath towels embedded with mechanical eyeballs surveying the audience. Anecdotal evidence over the years suggests this was an early gig from a group called the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, later to cute their name down to the last two words, featuring a young Danny Elfman as the devil. But there I was, hearing Cab Calloway's words coming out the rubbery, exaggerated mouth of red-painted crooner inside a shrine dedicated to holding on to the orphans of cinema, and I felt both enthralled and at home. Any true map of the places I have lived in my life wold have to include the address 620 Lincoln.

Opening Night.

What had opened in 1951 as a part of the Fox West Coast Theatre Corporation's exhibition chain, a deco-infused first-run house showing traditional Hollywood fare, had by 1968 found itself on the ropes. Whether because of dropping attendance in the age of television or the fact that the theatre didn't posses the majesty (or prime location) of it's sister theatres in Westwood and on Wilshire, the building's decline as a theatre was protracted but inevitable. Gaining a second wind as a revival theatre in the 1970s then as an Art house in the early 1980s, the Fox Venice couldn't hold on in an era where most palaces (or barns, as large older theatres were called by that time) were carved into multiplexes or simply leveled for their land. The final blow came in 1988 when building renovations uncovered asbestos, a common fire-proofing material that was commonly used in public buildings since been known to cause cancerous mesothelioma, that forced the auditorium to be shut down and gutted. That the basic shell of the Fox Venice theatre still stands is more a testament to the fact that the surrounding neighborhood hasn't seen much in the way of modern development and, sadly, not some grand notion that the building is worth anything beyond the memories it triggers.

It would be fitting to end with a memory of the last film I ever saw at the Fox Venice, but I just don't know what it was. It would had to have been in late July or early August of 1980, and the fact that I don't remember it as strongly as other outings that summer after I graduated from high school – final group excursions to Stan's Donuts and Falaful King in Westwood, last “hangs” with friends at Foster's Freeze on Washington Blvd. and sunsets at Dockweiler Beach in Playa Del Rey, a last stroll of the Fox Hills Mall and a group field trip to Magic Mountain in Valencia – leads me to believe that the last movie I ever saw at the Fox Venice was a solo outing. And as I did when I moved away to college, I never said goodbye to friends and family thinking I would never see them again, I never thought to say a final farewell to the Fox Venice I knew and loved.

-- David Elzey 

photo credits, from top to bottom:
Los Angeles Movie Palaces, photo credit: Bill Counter
the author's private collection
Cinema Treasures 
USC Digital Library, Herald Examiner Collection, photo credit: Donald Irwin Sandusky


additional reference material:
Virtual Venice, "Tale of the Fox," from the Free Venice Beachhead, June 1978

Venice West: The End of the Line

ON THE subject of Venice, and what it symbolized in Lawrence Lipton's piece we read earlier this week, I thought you all might like to take a look at this scrolling/mural video that KCET Departures produced. It's a fascinating virtual walk through the history and present-day scene of Venice, West.

Click here to view.

-- L.G.

Lords of Dogtown: "Poetic License"

JUST A QUICK riff on Caroline's post about Dogtown and Z-Boys.

Not too long after the documentary about the Westside skate tribes made its rounds, a feature film based on their story premiered on the big screen in 2005. The film,  Lords of Dogtown, is the dramatized retelling of the story of skaters Jay Adams, Stacy Peralta and Tony Alva. 

Jay, Stacy and Tony -- the "Hollywood Version" in  Lords of Dogtown

Directed by Stacy Peralta, (who was part of the scene and also prominently featured in the doc) Lords of Dogtown explores the same ground yet via a different prism.  It's a clarifying compliment to watch the two side by side. While 2001's Z-Boys was frank, edgy and gloriously frayed at the edges in a realistic way,  the Lords of Dogtown is all mood,  evoking a re-enacted of-the-moment "sense of place." It speaks to some elements we have been discussing in class -- voice, point of view and how memories of places and scenes now gone -- unfold differently in various hands.

Jay Adams, for one, pretty much thought the film was in a way, Dogtown Lite.That, however, he suggests, was largely the problem with the Hollywood version of gritty subcultures:

 "Movies about surfing and skateboarding have always turned out to be pretty bad. Usually they're pretty corny. The only one that I ever really liked was “Big Wednesday.” Movies like “Thrashin” made me want to hide. I think “Lords of Dogtown” was kind of like “Blue Crush” but for little boys instead of girls. “Blue Crush” was a little girl movie. I thought they did a good job on it. I thought the same for ours. I mean, it was PG-13. How real can it be?

First of all, Stacy Peralta never hung out with us. He was a Z boy, but he wasn't a Dogtowner. I have to give Stacy a lot of credit. Think of how hard it would be to write a movie about yourself and not come across as being big-headed. Stacy was a really great skateboarder. He did good in contests and was smart as far as making money is concerned. Some of the things in the movie were true, but a lot were made up just to make the story better."

Adams has photographed and written extensively about the scene himself.  You might want to check this out too. 


Here's a couple of windows in on that moment in L.A via Stacy Peralta's POV.:

Lords of Dogtown: The Trailer: 

 Pool Skating: Let's turn "the dream" inside out . . .

-- L.G.

Dogtown and Z-Boys: L.A. Then and Now

"There is a place where American manifest destiny collides into the Pacific Ocean. This is Dogtown"

--Dogtown and Z-Boys

DURING class last week, I jotted down some ideas for blog inspiration while our speaker, Mike the Poet,  recited his poems by heart while occasionally inserting Los Angeles tidbits and suggestions for our reading and viewing. Among these ideas were the words and phrases, "Venice," "Cold cases/unsolved mysteries," "The Black Dahlia," "Noir," "Gary Phillips," "Dave Eggers," and "Dogtown and Z-Boys." Inspired by my list, I decided to watch Dogtown and Z-Boys, a documentary about skateboarding and surfing in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Although, as a native Texan, I have never surfed or skateboarded, I found the documentary very interesting, especially because of the illustrations and images it provided of old Los Angeles. I have always thought that in order to understand a place better, you must first understand it's history, and Z-Boys offered a glimpse of what Los Angeles was like back in the 1970s through telling the story of the Zephyr skate team and how they helped shape modern skateboarding into what it is today.

I find it hard to summarize the documentary because it presented so many personal stories and interviews from the Zephyr skate team, but in a nutshell, it discussed how skateboarding and surfing have come to be what they are today through the influence of a group of Angeleno kids who simply loved to surf, skate, and have fun doing so, yet accidentally and inadvertently created a cultural phenomenon, transforming skateboarding to something that was considered an insignificant hobby to a sport, lifestyle, and attitude.

One of the most surprising aspects of the documentary was the discussion of the image surfing used to have. Now, especially in California, surfing is a popular and arguably "cool" thing to do. It requires talent, money, and often a proximity to the beach. Most kids who live near the beach are often skilled in surfing or have at least tried it. The kids I babysit, who live in Manhattan Beach, often go to the beach to surf on weekday mornings for school, as it is considered a sport for Physical Education class. However, surfing in 1971-72 was completely different and was considered an outcast sport. Surfing was not something you did to build your self-esteem or gain popularity, but was rather an antisocial activity done by kids who were considered drop outs. From surfing, skateboarding became popular because when the waves died down by 10am, Angeleno kids needed another hobby, and so they glued wheels from hand-me-down roller skates to pieces of plywood and practiced the surfing tricks they learned in the water on land, using empty swimming pools as their creative canvases.

The most astonishing and inspiring aspect of the documentary was the general message that these kids weren't trying to create a phenomenon through their skating--they just wanted to be kids, having fun and doing what they loved, and this genuine passion and talent for the sport manifested itself into an entire movement, as skateboarding became so popular that skateboarding magazines were the best sellers at gas stations. The kids who decided to take advantage of their new found fame and market themselves traveled across the country and became famous everywhere, even abroad.

As for what I learned about California, I jotted down and copied below some notable quotes that reflect how Los Angeles used to be. The vintage black and white pictures and videos of the Zephyr team skateboarding in empty pools, (drained due to a serious drought at the time), and surfing on crowded beaches offered a view into Los Angeles circa 1970.

A quote from the film on the striking differences between parts of Los Angeles that we have talked about in class and that still exists today:

"There is an invisible line of demarcation from the North side of Santa Monica and the South side. On one side, there are trophy houses with a lot of money, and the other side isn't like that at all. There is a visible financial line: If you lived above Wilshire you had money, if you lived below Wilshire, you wanted their money."

I am not sure where exactly these visible financial lines exist today, but judging from what I have seen of Los Angeles and how it can go from astonishingly wealthy to extremely run-down in a matter of minutes, I have no doubt that many of these lines are still present today. There isn't just one line of demarcation, but multiple lines, and through my adventures exploring new parts of L.A., I hope to find them.

Link to watch the entire documentary (in 8 parts) online: http://www.ovguide.com/dogtown-and-z-boys-9202a8c04000641f80000000002fc241

--Caroline Queen

--Photo Credit: Amazon.com

Abbot Kinney's Venice by the Sea

WALKING AROURND Venice, you might stumble upon its canals. They're clustered away from the Venice boardwalk and Abbot Kinney, in a part of the city that boarders Marina del Rey. The murky green water reflects skinny palms and bristling pine trees. You might have thought you were in Italy, you might have thought you were in the oak-filled Midwest. Bumming around its pathways a few weekends ago was me, my friend, and my family.

We were wandering. Just looking around at the different architecture of the houses, some of them funky and colorful, while others were quaint and rustic, while even more others fashioned ultra-hip contemporary. No congruity. It was remarkable to see such variety - people's differing tastes while sharing the similarity of living in the Venice canals, such a iconic location. Far from the city's namesake - the original Venice, Italy - the canals reflect a similar unsteady balance between mankind's structures and the natural world. In this setting, both contribute to the other's beauty.

We walked, we walked, we walked. We stepped along in single-file down the narrow paved sidewalks next to the water. By foot, I could observe the tiny details: the symmetry of a plant, the shallow depth of the water, the insides of houses. I'd always heard of the Venice canals, but had never experienced them as of yet. It's easy to get lost in the intricate system of pathways lining the canals. It was a mini-journey, a tiny discovery in the great wide expanse of land known as Los Angeles. It's comforting to know that these pockets exist, tiny places that feel like they belong to you even if it's your first time there.

-- Jennifer Pellerito

Photo Credit: Jennifer Pellerito

Getting Lost: First Fridays

I AM lazy and I will be the first to admit that. I like staying home, curling up on the couch in my pajamas, with a cat or two and watching stupid television with my husband. Add a glass of wine to that and it is my perfect Friday night. However, I live in Los Angeles and this fact does have me feeling guilty about the fact that my husband and I never go out. So this semester I purposefully took the Theatre in LA class because we are required to go out into the city and see a play every week. Friday night found me in Venice on abbot Kinney on the first Friday of the month to see "Awake in a World that Encourages Sleep" at the Electric Lodge. Normally this would not be a big deal but this area has been one I have avoided in the past, especially on a first Friday. I hate crowds, which is the biggest reason why I hate going out. If the place is worth going to then it is probably crowded, which for me, then eliminates the worth going part of it. First Fridays on Abbott Kinney definitely draws the crowds. Luckily my parents and I arrived early in order to make parking less of a headache.

The shops that align Abbott Kinney are full of unique items far beyond the reach of my wallet but a girl can dream and this is the place to do it. A home store full of items from Scandinavia left me puzzling at the tags in the unfamiliar language. We walked along the street admiring the blast from the past architecture, which sent my mother right back into the 60's. The smell of the gathering food trucks began to intrigue us and we started to ponder what kind of food we wanted for dinner.

We were pushed here and there as several kinds of people made their way up and down the street. We weaved between people doing our best not to step on a tiny Chihuahua. She turned her head either snarling back at us for almost stepping on her or she simply pleading that we rip the fluffy pink tutu off of her so she could continue her walk with dignity.

After scouring the block we honed in on a parking lot with the coveted grilled cheese truck and my mother declares she will eat that, even though we had it one week earlier. The parking lot belongs to a bar so we hunker down, hiding from the growing numbers of people, sip rather expensive beers and wait for the food trucks to serve. Leaving the grilled cheese truck for ten minutes was a mistake, seeing that the line had grown to fifteen people deep and we had to wait even longer, however it was definitely worth it. With cheese on the outside of the grilled bread, sweet grilled onions and perfectly melted Gruyere cheese, that delectable sandwich cannot be found elsewhere. First Fridays on Abbott Kinney in Venice beach are a huge attraction and if you want food you should get there early, in fact if you don't you may as well go somewhere else unless standing in line for thirty minutes to an hour for food out of a truck sounds like fun, which to m obviously isn’t. I hate crowds, but they are there for a reason and even though it was crowded I will probably return to a First Friday in Venice, but look for me early because I will definitely beat the crowds.

--Mickala Jauregui
Caption: Abbot Kinney Blvd
Credit: Gema Campos Hernando, via flickr creative commons