Changing Channels : Plan to Renovate Venice Waterways OKd After 30 Years

It took cigar-chomping dreamer Abbot Kinney just one year early in the century to construct an American Venice--complete with amusement parks, canals and imported gondoliers--in a swamp on the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

But it has taken the people who live in Kinney’s community three decades to come up with a plan for saving what’s left of those canals.

In Venice, which prides itself on being an artistic and intellectual gathering place, the renovation has stalled again and again over battles about everything from duck droppings to development, with side skirmishes into such issues as: Should the canal walls be vertical or sloped? Should a saxophone player be allowed to repair his car in the nude? Should tiny ramps be built for birds who care to waddle out of the canals?

Such are the quandaries of modern-day California dreamers.

The wrangling ended last week, when the California Coastal Commission approved a $6-million plan to renovate the canals. If all goes as expected, construction will begin in March and be finished by 1994. Plans call for the crumbling banks to be lined with vertical, concrete-block walls. The canals will be emptied of their polluted waters and a flushing system will be installed.

The sidewalks along the canals, so unsafe that they were closed to the public in 1942, will be repaired. Wooden footbridges will be rebuilt, a boat ramp will be constructed, and, yes, there will be duck ramps.

Most residents who live along the six waterways--the milelong Grand Canal and five others, each about a quarter of a mile, nestled between Washington and Venice boulevards--are elated with the go-ahead. They believe that the repairs will not only make their neighborhood more attractive, but increase property values.

But others lament that the overhaul will hasten the extinction of the last vestiges of the area’s old, run-down charm and freewheeling lifestyle.

“I used to love the scruffy feel,” said Helen Fallon, a longtime resident who fought the original renovation. “Now it will just become too cutesy.”

“Venice is supposed to be a city of dreams--but the last part of the dream that’s left is being glitzed over,” said David Contant, a carpenter who used to canoe his way to work along the waterways.

In recent years, many of the tiny bungalows along the canals have been replaced by massive, modern homes that completely fill their lots. Contant, complaining that he feels closed in by the huge houses, has moved to Mar Vista, rented out his bungalow, and padlocked the canoe.

These days, a visitor is more likely to see young professionals rowing sculls for their morning workouts than free spirits in canoes. Mark Galanty, president of the Venice Canals Assn., is one of the scullers, and he is tired of worrying about banging into submerged grocery carts and other trash stuck in canal muck.

The canals will be a lot more charming and safe if they are cleaned up, said Galanty, who is credited with guiding the project to fruition, and he is confident that the community can balance development and preservation.

Most of Kinney’s original canals were filled in 1927. By 1942, the remaining canals, which were built by an unknown developer, had become so run-down and polluted that the city closed them to the public. That did not stop the flower children and other free spirits from moving into the decaying bungalows in the 1960s, nor developers from snatching up vacant lots for as little as $15,000 in the 1970s. Not everyone remembers the era fondly.

“It was a garbage dump,” said builder Alex Mlikotin.”There were human creatures on the bottom of the social ladder, old Volkswagen buses full of hippies hanging around smoking pot.”

Predictably, there soon was a clash between the newcomers and longtime residents, who feared that their way of life was vanishing. It was during this period that a nasty battle ensued over the right of one resident to repair his car in the nude, and another raged over whether duck droppings were so dangerous to human health that the flocks should be deported.

Today, lots sell for $400,000. Most of the artists and hippies have moved out, and in their place are lawyers, architects, doctors and other professionals.

The laid-back lifestyle has disappeared. The two-income couples who can afford a home along the canals arrive home from their jobs so late that they barely have the energy to turn on the gas barbecue. Jaguars have supplanted the VWs, and it is not uncommon for residents to hire auto detailers to come to their homes to wax their fancy cars. Other neighbors hire parking valets when they stage parties.

Since the first newcomers started moving to the canals, residents have been pushing to repair them, but the campaign ran into one obstacle after another. One of the more ambitious plans would have transformed the canals into a full-scale marina. Another, so controversial that it left neighbors lifelong enemies, would have lined the canals with concrete. The idea was ditched when it was pointed out that it would be inhospitable to the canals’ inventory of wildlife--including a species of small fish called the silverside, at least one mud crab (sighted under a bridge), and the California least tern, an endangered species.

That left canal residents with a plan championed by Los Angeles Councilwoman Ruth Galanter calling for the canal walls to be lined with a type of perforated concrete block called Armorflex. The theory is that pickle weed and salt grass will grow in hollows of the blocks, providing food for wildlife. But in a test trial, it took four plantings before a few wispy weeds showed through--thanks in part to the tender ministrations of Galanter’s legislative deputy, Jim Bickhart, who came out regularly with a hose to water the Armorflex.

The residents, however, came up with a more attractive brand of block called Loffelstein. Passions were high on both sides. At one point, Galanter proclaimed that it was “Armorflex or nothing.” Residents retorted that it might be nothing, then. Others did not like either kind. “They all look like little molars,” Fallon said.

Early this year, as she prepared to run for reelection, Galanter backed down and agreed to let the residents decide. They chose Loffelstein by a large margin.

“I’ve been in few places where people get as emotionally involved over every little thing,” Bickhart said recently. “It’s been kind of a tragicomedy.’

The ending is happy for most people in the canals, though. Real estate brokers and developers predict that the renovation will increase the values of the lots further and speed the disappearance of the older bungalows. Realty agents foresee a corresponding shift in house-hunters.

“They’ll be new, glitzy smartass rich--the kind of people who buy in the Silver Strand,” one realty agent said, referring to a community of new, $1-million-and-up mansions half a mile to the south near Marina del Rey.

This forecast has left people such as Contant and Fallon feeling forlorn. Fallon is thinking of moving her family to Seattle, where she says there still are “real people” with children.

Contant has begun to identify with the canals’ ducks, whose numbers are dwindling because they are losing nesting places, he said. The miniature ramps to be built for them will be no solution, he said, because the ramps are near roads and the ducks are likely to get run over.

“We’ll have to scrape them off with a putty knife,” he sighs, and predicts that before long, he and other old-time residents will be left by the wayside as well.