Dream Is Alive in Venice as Canal Renovation Test to Get Under Way

They won’t be all that much, really. Just a couple of strips of interlocking concrete blocks, each strip about 8 feet wide and perhaps 10 to 12 feet long.

But when city workers put them in place today on the muddy banks of Sherman Canal at Dell Avenue, they will be tangible evidence that a 34-year drive to renovate the sadly decayed Venice canal system is still alive.

This is not to say that the often delayed Venice Canals Rehabilitation Project is finally under way. That would be premature.

The strips are merely what’s known these days as a “demonstration project”--designed, in this case, to demonstrate to the California Coastal Commission that a concrete lining for the canal will work.

Flora and Fauna

Rick Ruiz, a spokesman for City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, said Friday that if the strips do their job--retaining the sloughing, water-soaked banks while still permitting the nurturing and growth of indigenous flora and fauna in the spaces between the interlocking blocks--then the $1.8-million rehabilitation project, scaled down from a $25-million version 15 years ago, may become a reality at last.

It’s not all that Abbot Kinney would have hoped for, but it’s something.

Kinney, a developer who’d made his fortune by cornering the tobacco market in Turkey a few years before, stood on the sparkling beach in 1903 and announced his plans to build, right there, a Venice in America--a citadel of culture in Southern California.

Just two years later, the framework for his dream community was complete: 16 miles of interlocking canals, crowned with public buildings in the Renaissance style that included a 5,000-seat auditorium. To add to the flavor, gondolas--and gondoliers--were imported from Italy.

Kinney, in the words of a contemporary account, hoped his community would provide “entertainment for the cultured, good music for the masses, wholesome playgrounds for the children and artistic home sites for writers, musicians, sculptors, painters and retired capitalists.”

But Kinney misread Southern Californians’ tastes.

‘Dark Ages’

Opera--even “Camille,” starring Sarah Bernhardt--bombed. But honky-tonk--the entire amusement park purchased from the Portland World’s Fair--flourished, along with legalized gambling and other less cultured pursuits. Venice had entered what locals once referred to as its “Dark Ages.”

As some of the canals and the lagoon that facilitated regular tidal cleansing were filled in, the remaining waterways became stagnant, weed-choked and clotted with oil from nearby drilling rigs. Contamination from inadequate sewage systems forced the closing of the beach to swimmers for more than eight years.

Finally, in 1954, a local resident, Henry W. Greene, announced that he had had enough and called upon his neighbors to do what they could to salvage Venice.

What followed over the years were dozens of competing proposals. Some called for restoration of the community to its original glory; others simply suggested methods of stemming the blight. Some called for creation of special assessment districts costing homeowners as much as $21,000 apiece; others suggested government funding.

Interest waned in the 1960s and ‘70s in the wake of escalating assessment district costs and government funding cutbacks under Proposition 13, but it picked up again in the early ‘80s when the area was declared a landmark and listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

The latest proposal--a limited version of an assessment district authorization approved by the Los Angeles City Council in 1986--calls for relining the banks of the remaining 3 miles of canals with the segmented concrete blocks to keep things in place, according to Ruiz.

Whether that actually gets under way, he said, will depend on whether the Coastal Commission decides today’s demonstration project is successful.