Venice Canals Reopen to a Stream of Support : Redevelopment: It has been far from smooth sailing for the $6-million project. But all the ill feelings seem to have been forgotten now that the waterways are rebuilt.

Fifty years of fighting and false starts were so much water under the footbridge Tuesday as a boatload of city officials formally opened the rebuilt Venice Canals, gently joking about the glacial pace of the $6-million project.

As a neighborhood leader punted her sailboat-turned-gondola in a wobbly course down Eastern Canal, Los Angeles Councilwoman Ruth Galanter shrugged off an onlooker’s request for an accompanying song--say, something Italian.

“This is the canals,” Galanter said. “It’ll take us 50 years to decide on which song.”

The project--partially funded through a special city assessment on the 380 canal properties--replaced broken sidewalks, planted wetland vegetation along new banks, and scooped two feet of muck and tires from the bottom of canals that had grown pea-soup green with algae and stunk like rotten eggs.

The 20 months of reconstruction ended decades of aborted plans and clashing visions over the 88-year-old waterways--the mile-long Grand Canal and five quarter-mile canals. It was the second major Venice project in two years in which Galanter drew credit for unclogging city bureaucracy. The first, the renovation of Venice Boulevard, was finished last year after languishing for 30 years.

In many ways, the canal restoration completes the neighborhood’s 15-year transformation from a shaggy hangout for squatters and Bohemians to a pricey and fashionable oasis for the cellular-phone set.

“When you drive over a bridge, you leave L.A. It’s like being in a different part of the country,” said Mark Galanty, a producer of television commercials who heads the Venice Canals Assn. and the person pushing Galanter’s borrowed boat. Galanty, a nine-year canal resident and frequent sculler, proposed to his wife while paddling around the canals in a rowboat.

The mood was triumphant Tuesday among the 100 or so residents and city officials congratulating each other along the newly planted banks. It was a far cry from past bickering over everything from the slope of the banks and the inclusion of little duck ramps to whether the project would bury the neighborhood’s scruffy soul beneath a cutesy facade.

The last major disagreement ended three years ago, when Galanter gave in after an election-season standoff with residents over which brand of concrete block would be used to reinforce the canal banks and provide a home for wetland grasses. That battle long over, the locals were showing off the concrete planters--brimming with pickle weed and salt grass--as proudly as baby’s first teeth.

The six canals, envisioned by Venice founder Abbot Kinney but built in 1905 as part of another developer’s subdivision, crisscross about a 10-block area south of Venice Boulevard, a quarter-mile from the beach. The canals fell into disrepair and were closed to the public in 1942 but were not filled in--unlike a separate network of canals Kinney had built nearby for his Venice of America development.

Flower children found the ramshackle bungalows in the 1960s and speculators found dirt-cheap deals there in the 1970s.

“There was a sweetness to it, but it was very tough. People were squatting on every lot,” said Laura Harrison, who has lived at the junction of two canals for 20 years. “It was a very, very rough neighborhood.”

Harrison recalled a real estate agent warning her not to carry her purse when she first looked at canal property in the 1960s. She paid $30,000 for a bungalow anyway--a property she said would now sell for 20 times that amount--and rented it for years before moving in.

The 1980s development boom sent prices soaring to $500,000 or more for a 30-by-90-foot canalside lot. The recession has cut that in half, but homeowners expect that the restoration job will boost property values by up to 25%.

Being Venice, the canals have seen plenty of commotion--most recently over a state-ordered eradication of ducks believed to have carried a fatal bird virus--but locals there describe an offbeat and cozy place, with goofy boat parades and still a few bikers around.

“It’s heaven,” said Pat Talbott, lounging on a catamaran-like canoe after a slow paddle up and down Carroll Canal. Talbott claims the canals as her own, even though she lives half a block away on Ocean Avenue.

“I’m, like, canal-adjacent,” she said. “Water view.”