Oakwood: The Black Neighborhood That Built Venice

Abbot Kinney needed workers to dig his canals. He hired Black laborers for that work in nineteen oh four and nineteen oh five, which was not unusual for California at the time. What was unusual is what happened after the canals were dug: some of those workers and their families stayed. They settled in the western part of the development, in the blocks that became the Oakwood neighborhood, and they built a community that would outlast the gondoliers, the Red Cars, the beatniks, and the skateboarders by surviving all of them.

Oakwood became Venice's African American and Latino working-class core. It persisted through every cultural reinvention the neighborhood went through in the twentieth century. The First Baptist Church of Venice, founded in nineteen oh six, is one of the few institutional structures from that period still standing. The city of Los Angeles designated it a Historic-Cultural Monument in twenty twenty-one.

When Kinney died in nineteen twenty, he willed his own house to his chauffeur, a Black man named Irvin Tabor, who had been his trusted companion for years. Tabor moved two of Kinney's structures to his Oakwood lot and lived there until his death. That act of inheritance was one of the few moments in early Los Angeles history where a Black man acquired property through a white patron's deliberate choice rather than against the grain of every system around him.

National Geographic documented in twenty twenty-one that over a century of Black history in Oakwood was being erased by displacement and rising property values. The First Baptist Church is still there. Most of the families who built the neighborhood are not.