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Southern California has certain similarities to Mediterranean Europe.
It’s at about the same latitude; and a similar combination of ocean,
coastal mountains, and abundant sunshine keeps the weather mild and
pleasant much of the time. That encourages real estate developers to
invoke Mediterranean locales in promoting their projects.
Palos Verdes Estates started out
as an upscale imitation of Spanish and Italian hill towns, complete with
red tile roofs. Santa Barbara
proclaims itself “the American Riviera.” And at the beginning of the
20th century, two unrelated Los Angeles-area developers pondered tracts
of swampland— one south of Santa Monica, the other in Long Beach— and
had visions of Venice.
Abbott Kinney broke ground on his “Venice of America” beach resort in
1905. The Kinney family had made a fortune in the tobacco business, so
Abbott received an appropriately upper-crust education in Europe that
included a walking tour of Italy. Thanks to a lengthy stop in Venice, he
envisioned a piece of swampland near Santa Monica as his own Venetian
theme park community, complete with a lagoon, bridges, gondolas, and a
main street with a “Venetian Renaissance” facade.
By 1910, Venice was a successful and popular combination of Disneyland
and Coney island, with a 366-meter pleasure pier and a continuous
beachside carnival. Kinney was effectively the Doge of his Venice,
completely dominating the city’s politics after incorporating it. By
1920, Venice had a professional baseball franchise, a miniature
railroad, an aerial police force, and numerous speakeasies (underground
drinking establishments that widely flouted Prohibition). The population
was over 10,000. Unfortunately, that was just when the Kinney family
business claimed Abbott as one of its casualties. He died of lung cancer
in November 1920.
Without its Doge, the Venice City Council proved unable to either govern
or maintain the city’s infrastructure. In 1925, residents voted to annex
their city into into Los Angeles. The Los Angeles City Council had no
interest in decadent entertainment. And those absurd canals needed to be
filled in to make way for roads, as the automobile was well on its way
to dominating the Southern California landscape. The city quickly shut
down the amusement park accouterments, but residents stubbornly resisted
the demolition of their canals. After lengthy litigation, the city
finally prevailed in 1929. But by then oil had been discovered in the
area, and the drilling operations had fouled the canals.
Between 1929 and the 1980s, Venice suffered from neglect by Los Angeles
officials. I suspect they might have harbored lingering institutional
antipathy toward Abbott Kinney’s freewheeling creation.
The Depression and World War II took their toll as well. Venice became a
decrepit haven for the “beat generation” in the 1950s and for “hippies”
in the 1960s. Then it became a blighted slum.
In the 1980s, beach cities responded to the fitness boom and the
popularity of in-line skates by building the skating and biking path
that runs along the beach from Torrance to Santa Monica. That spurred
improvements to Venice Beach and the “gentrification” of the canal
district as an enclave of distinctive and astronomically-priced homes.
Today Venice Beach is a popular weekend destination with a street-fair
atmosphere that echoes the Abbott Kinney era. Behind the beach, the
revived canal district retains vestiges of its Venetian character. On a
weekday morning it’s a pleasant, tidy, and decidedly serene place for
walking, reflection, and communing with the ducks that make the canals
their home.
Arthur M. Parsons founded Southern California’s other Venetian-inspired
community. His family wasn’t wealthy, so I don’t know if he ever visited
Venice. But he did help William Frederick Cody organize the Buffalo
Bill Wild West show, developed real estate in Los Angeles, and wrote
several popular novels. In 1903 Parsons was a salesman for a real estate
company that was developing the Alamitos Peninsula. The peninsula forms
the west side of Alamitos Bay, at the southwest corner of Long Beach.
Across the bay was some rather unappealing muddy swampland, considered
useless because it flooded at every high tide.
By 1905, with a healthy bank balance from his own investment in the
Alamitos Peninsula, Parsons was considering other land in the area to
develop. One day he looked across the bay at the mud flats and had a
vision of a certain serene city on the Adriatic that also happened to be
built on swampland. He took an envelope from his pocket and sketched an
island surrounded by a circular canal with arched bridges and the
obligatory gondolas. He commissioned a surreptitious test that found
buildable land buried underneath a few centimeters of mud. Parsons then
convinced the skeptical Bixby family to sell him this piece of their
Rancho Los Alamitos holdings,
and began the process of subdividing his own version of Venice.
But he couldn’t call it Venice, since Abbott Kinney’s project was
already well underway. So as part of the publicity for the new
development, Parsons announced a contest to name it. Out of several
thousand submissions, Naples was the winning entry. Although the real
Naples is more famous for pizza and the Vesuvius volcano than for any
canals or bridges (which it lacks), it is situated on a scenic bay.
That apparently struck Parsons as just the right branding.
Parsons shrewdly invited Henry Huntington to become president of the
company that would develop Naples. Huntington owned the Pacific Electric
Railway. Its streetcars provided Los Angeles with extensive and reliable
mass transit in the days before the automobile supplanted it and
catalyzed today’s metastatic conurbation. Huntington’s involvement
assured easy streetcar access to Naples, which Parsons exploited by
offering daily promotional tours. Over a free picnic lunch, Parsons and
his salesmen touted the advantages of bayside living and offered easy
financing of 9-by-12-meter lots that cost between $900 and $4,000
(equivalent to around $20,000 to $90,000 in 2007 dollars).
Unlike Abbott Kinney’s wild and crazy Venice, Parsons apparently never
intended Naples to be anything other than an upscale residential
community. Aside from one hotel that was briefly open from 1929 to 1931,
there were (and are) no accommodations for visitors. Parsons also had no
political ambitions. That’s probably why Naples looks pretty much as he
sketched it on that envelope over a century ago. Parsons gave everything
on the island the names of Italian cities and landmarks. The main
circular canal is the Rivo Alto, the old name— meaning “high bank”—
for the historical civic center of Venice (better known by its
streamlined modern name, Rialto). Unlike the shallow, decorative
canals of Abbott Kinney’s Venice, the Rivo Alto canal in Naples leads
directly to Alamitos Bay, on the ocean. The lucky (and wealthy) owners
of the prime real estate on the canal have private docks for a flotilla
of boats.
Visitors to Naples usually stroll along the canals, and possibly take a
gondola cruise (which wasn’t operating on the Tuesday afternoon when I
took these pictures). But it’s worth venturing “inland” from the canals.
Wandering among the narrow alleyways, it’s easy to imagine that you’re
in Europe. Parsons laid out the streets and alleys— officially
designated as “walks”— without regard to the automobile, which was then
a novelty. Parking difficulties are exacerbated by the presence of many
SUVs that also spoil the Old World illusion. Backing my car out of one
very narrow blind alley was a déjà vu flashback to
similarly challenging maneuvers in Provence, France. Strangely, Parsons seems to have
forgotten that no Italian town can be complete without a piazza
surrounding a fountain. Residents finally corrected that omission in
1971 with La Bella Fontana di Napoli, the three-tiered “beautiful
fountain of Naples.” The piazza was originally a mini-park built around
the vent for a septic tank.
During the 20th century, residential real estate development in Southern
California became synonymous with sprawling tracts of cookie-cutter
houses or condominiums. Some of those developments impose deed
restrictions and grant “homeowners associations” the totalitarian power
to enforce strictly regimented uniformity. But Venice and Naples reflect
an earlier era, when developers sold only land and left buyers to build
homes pretty much as they pleased. Even though most homes have been
replaced since the days of Kinney and Parsons, they still display
distinctly individual character. It’s reflected in the architecture as
well as in often quirky decoration. Even if they aren’t accurate copies
of “the Most Serene jewel of the Adriatic,” Naples and the Venice canal
district are distinctive oases in a desert of urban sprawl.
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