Professionals’ Home : A New Scene for Venice: It’s Upscale

Peter Hernandez has reassessed his position on the beach community called Venice.

As a kid growing up in Pacific Palisades, Hernandez wouldn’t be caught dead in Venice. As a real estate broker with mid-year sales of more than $10 million, he rarely ventures beyond its borders.

Hernandez cruises the streets in a shiny white BMW, cradling a cellular telephone to his suntanned cheek. His office and his beachfront condominium are in Venice. So are the restaurants, art galleries and health clubs he visits in his spare time.

Hernandez has not changed so much in recent years. But he thinks Venice has. “People are proud to live in Venice now,” said Hernandez, 33, a slim man with dark features, a brooding face and an extensive designer wardrobe. “It’s a cool thing. It’s an in spot.”

A Shared Faith

Like Hernandez, a growing number of professionals are calling Venice home these days, laying claim to its historic houses, shops and businesses. There is a shared faith that crime and poverty are not endemic to the 40,000-member community, that Venice can be spit-shined and refined without losing its historic charm.

No one foresees an overnight transformation. But it’s obvious that Venice is cleaning up its act.

More than $400 million worth of commercial and residential development is under way or newly completed in areas that were barren or run down. Palatial homes are fetching more than $1 million on the narrow patch of land known as the Silver Strand. And improvement projects slated for the community’s neglected streets, canals and buildings are gradually moving forward.

Venice’s growth is also reflected in a steady rise in income. Per capita earnings are up 75% since 1979, and income has climbed more than 200% in the previous 10 years, the National Planning Data Corp. estimates. In the greater Los Angeles area, by comparison, income has risen 45% since 1979.

Optimistic Outlook

And income is expected to continue growing. Researchers predict that roughly 15% of the people living in Venice will have earnings greater than $75,000 a year by 1991, compared to 9.4% today. The combined community income, another growth barometer, is expected to increase by 46%.

“You can tell there has been a change here,” said Venice historian Tom Moran. “You can see a march to the upscale.”

The down side is that Venice is not marching in unison. The poor and elderly are being pushed out by the young newcomers. The problems posed by a severe parking shortage are unresolved. And community organizations are at odds over development proposals.

People who value Venice as a last bastion of Bohemian culture along the dense California coastline contend that the influx of white, middle-class professionals is robbing the ethnically diverse community of its unique character.

A clashing of cultures is already evident. Parking for the pricey shops and restaurants on West Washington Boulevard spills into the slum area known as Oakwood. Automobile salvage yards front on neighborhoods where homes are being restored. And people in high-cost housing grudgingly share the ocean front with vagrants huddled under sun-bleached pagodas.

“There’s a tremendous amount of pressure building for the recycling of that community,” said Peter Douglas, director of the state Coastal Commission. “And I don’t sense that we’re moving in any clearly delineated direction.”

The task of developing a game plan for Venice’s future falls to the City of Los Angeles, but specific guidelines are still on the drawing board. Los Angeles City Councilwoman Pat Russell, who represents the Venice area, said she believes growth is proceeding slowly enough that residents will adapt to it.

Peter Hernandez shares her optimism.

Hernandez and his girlfriend, Kirsten Baker, live in a condominium on the southern edge of Venice. A semi-nude picture of the couple hangs over the mantle in their pastel-colored living room. They met when Hernandez was selling a Victorian house that Baker was renting.

“I had every reason to hate him,” said Baker. “He was selling the house that I was living in. But a mutual friend said that I should get to know Peter better because he’s really into personal growth and spiritual development.”

Baker and Hernandez have been together ever since. Neither smokes nor drinks and their interests run toward low-key social activities such as ballroom dancing, motion pictures and quiet dinners. Hernandez also jogs, surfs and kick-boxes. Baker studies ballet and jazz.

Werner Scharff, a 70-year-old developer who has been on the scene for several decades, said increasing numbers of people like Hernandez and Baker are discovering Venice. “This is a fabulous place,” said Scharff, one of Venice’s biggest owners of beachfront property. “And people want to live here.”

Until recently, Scharff was one of few developers banging the drum for growth in Venice. Most were driven away by community resistance and the frustrations of dealing with the city’s bureaucracy. Many still see Venice as a brick wall. But others have discovered that patience and compromise pay off.

Still, few of them expect to see Venice become a second Marina del Rey. Venice’s character is too ingrained. The roots of the dispossessed and the free-spirited run too deep. The spirit of Abbot Kinney, the eccentric cigar magnate who created Venice at the turn of the century, is too strong.

Kinney won the property that is now Venice in a coin toss when his business partnership dissolved. The area amounted to 160 acres of undeveloped marshland and was considered fairly useless. But Kinney had the whimsical idea of creating an Italian-style resort area there. He called his project Venice of America.

The dredging of the Venice canals began in 1904. Under Kinney’s direction, workmen excavated tons of dirt and gradually constructed a 16-mile-long canal network. Each canal was 40 feet wide and four feet deep with Venetian-style bridges. The canal system was fed by ocean water that passed through two large pipes. Kinney’s development also included a 1,700-foot pier, a Venetian-style hotel and several buildings with arched windows and elaborate ornamentation.

Venice of America opened June 30, 1905. More than 40,000 people took part in the celebration, which featured children’s rides, authentic gondoliers and musical performances. Even then, however, Venice’s offbeat personality was in evidence. “The architecture was the grandest,” one visitor reported at the time, “an intricate blend of Italianate columns, porticoes, and balustrades, only slightly marred by the presence of guess-your-weight machines.”

With its unique architecture and canals, Venice quickly proved its worth as a residential real estate development. Lots there sold for as much as $2,700, twice as much as property brought a couple of years later in another residential area called Beverly Hills. In 1911, Venice became a city.

Venice was a place to be in those days. Charlie Chaplin created his tramp character on the streets of Venice. Sarah Bernhardt performed there. And other early screen stars bought homes near the beach. The area’s potential seemed limitless in its first decade.

But by the 1920s, the appeal waned. Kinney’s death in 1920 seemed to rob Venice of its spirit. The amusements became seedy. The canal system failed. The local government was rocked by scandal.

Residents voted to become part of Los Angeles in 1925. In one of its first acts, the city filled some of the canals. Then, in 1929, oil was discovered. And by the 1930s, Venice was covered with 300 derricks. To no one’s surprise, the vacationers and families fled and Venice became the domain of poor people.

The slide continued through the Depression and World War II. Then, in the 1950s, the first wave of young people discovered Venice. It became a hub of the “beat generation,” a place known for poets and coffee houses. Ten years later, hippies and other free spirits replaced the beatniks in Venice.

Tom Sewell was one of them. Sewell was running an art gallery in Minnesota when he made his maiden voyage to Venice in 1966. An actor friend got him a job painting the bodies of topless dancers for a Peter Fonda movie called “The Trip,” and Sewell was hooked on the Venice life style.

“It was during the summer,” the 46-year-old Sewell recalled. “I had just arrived in town. I thought, ‘My God, this is great!’ So I decided to stay.”

Sewell has been in Venice ever since. In the early years he lived in a beach house and watched performers such as Janice Joplin and the Doors cut their teeth in Venice clubs. He drove around in a car dubbed the “Picklemobile,” a 1949 Studebaker covered with green polyurethane.

“My whole life was a happening,” Sewell said. “That was Venice.”

Lately Sewell has wheeled and dealed in real estate, written a book on Venice, dabbled in self-improvement movements and started an arty periodical called Magazine Main. He still has fond memories of the ‘60s, but his thoughts are firmly planted in the present. Sewell sees Venice at a crossroads.

His business sense tells him change is coming. His knowledge of history tells him that parts of the past should be preserved. But his instincts say that won’t happen unless people work together. So Sewell has become a leading advocate of compromise.

“Change doesn’t have to be bad for Venice,” said Sewell. “We don’t have to throw people out of their houses or raise rents. But we live here, dammit! Let’s keep it clean. Let’s make it beautiful. Let’s just do it.”

Sewell starts his mornings with a rigorous workout. Just after dawn he leaves his studio/home on Rialto Street and walks several blocks to the beach, where he devotes one hour to running, chanting, yoga and primal screaming. He ends his regimen by plunging into the cold and murky black waters. As he swims out past the rocks, Sewell said he feels totally alone. But by 8 a.m., as he heads back home with his dogs, the beach is already becoming crowded.

Ocean Front Walk is almost always awash with people on weekends. The mile-long cracked-asphalt pathway that separates the land from the beach is the major channel for tourists in Venice and the center of commerce for vendors.

Busy Place for Vendors

Police estimate that more than 200 vendors work on Ocean Front Walk. Rents have gone up 500% in 10 years--lot owners charge $250 to $1,500 a month for each vending slot--and most of the artisans and craftsmen who worked on the walk in the late 1970s have been priced out of the market.

Robert W. Goodfader operates the Sidewalk Cafe and rents spaces along the beachfront property he owns to vendors. Goodfader said prices were driven up by competition and demand. Some vendors sublet their spaces on weekdays and there is a two- to three-year waiting list for the most lucrative spots. Goodfader contends that the vendors have brought a better crowd to Venice.

“This was drug city,” he said. “We used to sweep up hypodermic needles every morning. Now you’ve got middle and even high-class people coming here.”

On a typical day, fast-talking salesmen peddle T-shirts to pale-looking tourists with cameras around their necks. Roller skaters move through the crowds in a nirvanic trance. Elderly people hold forth on benches. Weightlifters wince and moan for the crowds at Muscle Beach. Surfers sip coffee on the balconies of faded red brick apartments. And kids with “boom box” radios strut past clusters of vagrants.

Variety of Sounds

There’s the sensation of a radio dial changing as one’s ears are assaulted by the live and recorded sounds of folk, reggae, rap, bagpipe, heavy metal and the rantings of a fire-and-brimstone preacher. A visitor can get his energy balanced, his palm read and his portrait painted. He can get rolfed (a form of massage) and acupunctured. He may get his pocket picked. But crime is not a big problem.

More than a dozen police on foot, on bicycles, in cars and in four-wheel drive vehicles patrol Ocean Front Walk on busy days. Sgt. Mike Mines, who heads the beach patrol, said crowds have been well-behaved in recent years. The major problem for police is substance abuse among beachgoers, Mines said.

A self-described hobo named Lendell Ray McDowell has lived on Ocean Front Walk for several years. McDowell sleeps on the beach and spends his days under a pagoda, selling junk that he has rescued from trash cans.

He has been on the road for 10 years, drifting in and out of Venice. “This is pretty much of a hobo convention site,” said McDowell, 32, his watery blue eyes scanning the walk. “You see all kinds of craziness here.”

Sometimes the craziness wears on Ed Barger. The cameraman lives in an apartment just off Ocean Front Walk. On weekend nights Barger is serenaded by the sounds of wild parties. On Monday mornings he and his neighbors take turns hosing urine and garbage off the sidewalk outside their doors.

Sounds in the Night

“In the middle of the night you’ll hear blood curdling screams,” Barger said. “You don’t know if someone’s being attacked or just acting crazy.”

For all his complaints, however, Barger does not plan on leaving. Rent control has protected him from rising prices that have made it increasingly difficult to find affordable housing in Venice. Real estate experts say that rents and property values in Venice have nearly caught up to those in the nearby communities of Santa Monica and Marina del Rey.

Prices are rising especially fast in the canal area. The low-lying cottages that once marked the landscape are giving way to mammoth two-story homes, and even the smaller places cannot be purchased for less than $250,000.

The canals, a small grid of waterways connected by foot bridges, are located on the southern edge of Venice. Narrow roads lead to the houses and ducks paddle by in the water. Small boats are moored behind some homes, and neighbors wave to one another as they pass along dirt paths that used to be sidewalks.

Tom Moran bought a modest place there 10 years ago and watched as large modern houses rose around him. “When I first moved in, there were vacant lots where every one of the two-story houses is located,” Moran said. “Now the people in the newer houses look down at the ones in the older houses. It’s bothersome.”

Debate Over Canals

Even more bothersome to Moran is a disagreement that has developed over the restoration of the Venice canals, which have been deteriorating for several decades. Moran and other canal residents want the canals restored to their original state. But a larger residents’ group is making a strong push for a modern-style restoration that would be funded mostly by canal residents.

The $3.3-million restoration plan calls for dredging the six waterways and adding retaining walls, sidewalks, boat ramps, a storm drain and landscaping. Each of the 370 canal property owners would pay $7,000 over a 10-year period.

Moran says he does not object to the cost. But he questions why residents would want to tamper with the “historic beauty” of the canals.

Robin Piccone and Richard Battaglia are on the opposite side of the issue. The young couple bought and renovated a 600-square-foot house on the canals a couple of years ago. It is a cramped place with no dining room. So Piccone and Battaglia have their meals outside, amid the jasmine and orange blossoms. The two are fairly typical of the new canal residents--drawn by unique qualities of the area but impatient for changes that would make it more livable.

“Tom (Moran) wants this redone on a historic basis and we want it redone so that it will be safe for our children,” Piccone said of the crumbling and murky canals. “We want to see this neighborhood progress, not stagnate.”

In Oakwood, another Venice neighborhood several blocks north of the historic canal area, progress is measured in much smaller steps.

Oakwood is a blighted landscape of ramshackle homes and apartment buildings spattered with graffiti, with garbage and junked cars piled up in empty lots and a neighborhood ice cream truck with barred windows.

Economic figures are hard to come by, but surveys show that about 20% of Venice’s residents are living below the poverty line, and most of them are in Oakwood. The random gang violence that defined life there in the late 1970s has waned, but Oakwood remains an uneasy place. The reason is rock cocaine, also known as crack.

Oakwood has been gripped by the crack epidemic. Its streets are populated by wiry-looking men making fast bucks from people passing by in cars. Parents tell anguished stories of ghostly looking children who have fallen victim to the drug.

Church and community leaders in the predominantly black and Latino area marched down Oakwood’s streets throughout the summer, waving anti-drug placards and chanting slogans like “Nope to Dope” and “Ugh to Drugs.”

Teen-Ager’s Struggle

One of the places the marchers routinely passed was a small, unadorned apartment on Westminster Avenue. Tammi Peterson lives inside with her mother and her sister. At 18, she is struggling to make something of herself in a world where the chances of merely graduating from high school are little better than 50-50.

Some of her seven brothers and sisters have landed in prison, but Peterson avoided trouble by concentrating on sports and school. She graduated from Venice High School with a B average and was honored with a trophy for participating on the track team.

The trophy sits next to Peterson’s prom picture in the living room. A shy-looking 10th grader named Ray took her to the senior prom in a limousine. Neighbors stood on the sidewalk and applauded as Peterson descended the stairs in her formal.

“The dress was turquoise and white satin,” said Verta Washington, Peterson’s mother. “She saw it in a book. It cost $120 to get it made.”

Washington supports her family by working nights as a housekeeping aide at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. The living room in her tidy $630-a-month apartment is furnished with a blue velvet couch and two red chairs covered in plastic. She cooks dinner for her family each evening before she leaves for work. Washington said she has tried to provide a stable home life, but worries about her daughters.

Plenty of Sellers

“There are too many drugs here,” Washington said. “That’s the main thing. Get in your car and drive down the street and I guarantee you someone will run up and ask what you need. It’s terrible. I feel bad because I live here.”

Her daughter has mixed emotions. The doe-eyed, soft-spoken teen-ager enjoys listening to rap music and roller skating on Ocean Front Walk. But she is also determined to follow through on her plans to study computer electronics at a community college.

Forty percent of her classmates dropped out of high school, and many of the people she grew up with are already strung out. “Drugs are bigger than gangs now,” Peterson said. “Everybody looks sick.”

But even in Oakwood, where squalor and crime have persisted for decades, a subtle form of gentrification is already taking place.

Rosario Sandoval and his wife, Amparo, raised seven children in Oakwood, in an immaculate pink stucco home that stands in sharp contrast to the rest of the neighborhood. He was recently offered more than $100,000 to sell, but refused the offer. Others may not.

Influx of Professionals

Young couples who are fixing up homes in the Oakwood area are popping up at community meetings. And real estate agents say that increasing numbers of white professionals are buying in Oakwood, seizing the opportunity to own property near the beach for as little as $100,000.

Karen Dale, a tax attorney, and John Crain, a contractor, own one apartment building and two duplexes in Oakwood. They have renovated the three properties and are living in one of the duplexes.

“At first we were kind of scared,” said Dale, 34. “But we ended up falling in love with the area. People ask us how we can possibly live here, but we feel that the area has changed a lot over the years. It’s terrific.”

“Eighty percent of the people who live in this area are nice folks who live a quiet life and go to work everyday,” said Crain, 35. “Some of the low-income people will be here forever. But I think the drug dealers and others who hang out on the corner and trash their places will be a thing of the past.”

Peter Hernandez thinks change will take awhile. But he is prepared to wait. From where he’s sitting, the future is as bright as the sun that shines through his sliding glass window and as secure as the volley ball net that is anchored in the sand outside of his door.

“Venice is a diamond in the rough,” Hernandez says. “And now it is being polished.”

Susanna Shuster in the editorial library contributed to this story.

HOUSEHOLD INCOME DISTRIBUTION

1979 1986 1991 Estimated Projected Count Percent Count Percent Count Percent Less than $7,500 3,446 25.3 2,191 14.1 1,809 10.4 7,500-14,999 3,575 26.2 2,479 15.9 2,100 12.0 15,000-24,999 2,970 21.8 3,223 20.7, 2,929 16.8 25,000-34,999 1,482 10.9 2,308 14.8 2,604 14.9 35,000-49,999 960 7.0 2,445 15.7 2,901 16.6 50,000-74,999 772 5.7 1,459 9.4 2,460 14.1 75,000 and over 440 3.2 1,463 9.4 2,634 15.1

Source: National Data Planning Corp.