Abbot Kinney's Venice: A Fantasy Built on a Salt Marsh

The man who built Venice was a tobacco millionaire named Abbot Kinney who had made his fortune on the East Coast and come to California in the eighteen eighties looking for something to do with it. What he found, after winning a coin toss in nineteen oh four that split a real estate partnership with his former associate, was a coastal salt marsh south of Santa Monica: mosquito-ridden, tide-dependent, of essentially no agricultural use. He saw Venice, Italy.

He and his partner had bought the tract years earlier. Mule teams and then steam shovels began digging soon after the coin toss. He imported gondoliers from Italy, built colonnaded buildings meant to suggest the Adriatic, ran the Pacific Electric Red Car line south from Santa Monica to his entrance gates, and opened Venice of America on the Fourth of July, nineteen oh five. The combination of spectacle and transit worked: within a year, tens of thousands of visitors were arriving by rail.

Kinney kept building. He added a miniature railroad, a ship that rocked on mechanical waves, a canal boat service. He also added a ballroom, a bathhouse, and a performance stage. What he built was a real-estate proposition disguised as a cultural vision, and it was not an unusual formula for California at the time. What was unusual was the scale of the conviction.

By nineteen twenty-nine, the automobiles had won. Most of the canals were paved over to create wider roads. Six survive, designated a National Register Historic District in nineteen eighty-two, with major restoration completed in the nineteen nineties. You can walk them. They are quiet, lined with houses that sell for several million dollars each, ducks moving through the water below the footbridges.

The gondoliers are gone. The fantasy persists.