COVER STORY : Venice Has Always Thrived on the Unconventional, but Those Who Make a Living Off the Tourist Trade Say It’s Time for . . . : A Renaissance on the Boardwalk

Behind Venice Beach’s clownish facade are the worry lines of a place fretting about its future.

A severe business slump--the product of recession and new rivals for tourist dollars--has forced desperate souvenir merchants to borrow on their credit cards just to pay the rent. Boardwalk shopkeepers are still struggling to overcome worldwide publicity over gang fighting that prompted police to close the beach one afternoon last spring. And some artists grumble that the carnival air is being lost amid the din of amplified musicians and fly-by-night vendors, who they say have turned the boardwalk’s kooky performance strip into an glorified flea market of cheap incense, churros and cut-rate T-shirts. Even the fortunetellers accept credit cards.

“The magic’s not really there anymore--people feel it,” said Walt Davis, who for five years has drawn caricatures on Ocean Front Walk, as the boardwalk is officially known.

“There’s no money down there,” said Amani, a former boardwalk stunt performer who gave up last fall and now entertains on Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade. “The people who spend money weren’t going.”

While no one predicts that Venice’s year-round street fair will fold up its tent, the malaise has raised the stakes of two important upcoming battles: the shape of a planned $10-million make-over and a bid to more strictly regulate commercial activity along the boardwalk’s western seaside edge, which is city-owned parkland.

The proposals are favored by an unusually broad alliance of merchants, landlords and residents. But they are opposed by boardwalk Bohemians and a few others who fear that polishing the area’s rough edges could also scrub away the chaotic spirit that brings tourists in the first place.

“If you want to destroy the boardwalk, all you do is regulate it,” said a longtime performer known as Jingles, who now promotes vegetarianism from a table on the boardwalk. “Like the American Indians, it’ll be the end.”

The renovation plan, spearheaded by the Venice Boardwalk Assn. and Venice Action Committee, would refurbish the asphalt boardwalk with brick paving and antique lighting to evoke the turn-of-the-century era when Venice founder Abbot Kinney turned the beach into a West Coast Coney Island.

The groups’ proposal, which is before city recreation planners, would also create a series of small performance areas along the edge of the boardwalk and add a new paved beach path for walkers and skaters, who now clog the bicycle path.

The plan calls for the eventual demolition of the idle Venice Pavilion, a former theater whose fate has been bitterly disputed in years past. A group called the Venice Arts Mecca wants to resurrect the dilapidated 33-year-old building as a community artists’ bazaar, day-care center and theater.

Recreation and Parks Department officials already plan to spend up to $3.5 million to restore the damaged Venice Pier, which has been closed since 1986.

The refurbishment, to be paid from a $10-million bond issue approved by voters in 1992, will be the focus of a community meeting later this month. A detailed plan is to be sent to the city’s Board of Recreation and Park Commissioners in April, and eventually will go to the City Council.

Merchants and officials are also taking aim at the trade that bustles along the seaside edge in defiance of city law banning sales in parks. The law was amended three years ago to exempt political groups and charities. But many consider the measure a failure because artists have been cited by police, while groups claiming to be nonprofit have sold everything from jewelry to candy--competing with nearby stores.

“It’s almost like a flea-market setting down there,” said Hector Hernandez, the city’s chief park ranger. “There’s no control.”

The boardwalk association wants artists and nonprofits to register with the city before selling merchandise and limit any group to a six-foot space. Performers would not be affected. A multi-agency city task force is looking for ways to clamp down on illegal vending without denying First Amendment rights. It expects to recommend new rules in April.

Jewelry and clothing shop owner Pierre Khoury gestured angrily at a Rastafarian sect member selling T-shirts at a 20-foot-long table across from his shop. “We pay rent. We pay taxes. We pay employees,” Khoury said. “We sell T-shirts for $13. He sells them for $5. How can we compete?”

At the table, Hendy Foote folded black-pride shirts and shrugged off the shopkeepers’ complaints. He pointed to a nearby booth advocating the legalization of hemp. “We’re livening up the corner. If it wasn’t for us and the hemp people, this would be a dull, dead corner. We’re the reason they’re making money.”

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The boardwalk alliance’s twin efforts represent the most comprehensive attempt to manage the 1.5-mile strip--which extends from the Santa Monica border south to Washington Boulevard--since the demise of Kinney’s Venice of America amusement park in the 1940s.

The proposals have sparked debate over how to market one of Southern California’s largest tourist attractions in the face of challenges from other strollers’ spots developed in the past decade, such as the Third Street Promenade, Universal CityWalk and Pasadena’s Old Town district.

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“It’s a more competitive market, with the Promenade and Universal,” said Steve Heumann, who is vice president of Sidewalk Enterprises, a major property owner on the boardwalk’s private eastern edge. “Nationally, it’s a more competitive market. If we don’t compete, we’ll have a problem.”

Jordan Monkarsh is well-positioned to know. Sales dived 20% last year at his famous boardwalk sausage shack--Jody Maroni’s Sausage Kingdom--even while business boomed at his outlet at CityWalk, a private outdoor mall connected to Universal Studios.

“(CityWalk) is not intellectually challenging,” Monkarsh said. “It’s an adult amusement park. And it’s very safe.”

Boardwalk property owners and some of the strip’s 150 merchants banded last year and lobbied successfully for more police to cope with scattered gang activity and general crowd control, along with getting parking spaces for tour buses. The group this year hopes to stage a boardwalk talent contest--complete with cash prizes--as a promotional boost, an unusual event for a place where chaos has been the rule.

But some boardwalk observers see the renovation and the bid to tighten rules as a way to turn the strip into a sterile playground for yuppies and complete gentrification that has converted low-rent apartments into shops since the 1970s.

“It’s my sense that merchants are looking to make another Third Street Promenade, and I think there is a sense of unreality in expectations that they’ll get just as many visitors if it’s gentrified. It’s just not true,” said Elayne Alexander, a preservationist who has written a book on Venice’s history.

While some preservationists favor the renovation, opponents say the plan does not match the look of Kinney’s original Venice. Others worry that the proposed brick paving would drive away the trademark roller-skaters who have helped make the boardwalk an international symbol of fun in the sun.

Though longtime community gadfly Jerry Rubin no longer lives at the boardwalk--he moved to Santa Monica last year--he is circulating petitions to block the brickwork and any moves to impose order on the entertainment strip, including the proposed performers’ pockets.

“You can’t be a control freak. You can’t place everything where you think it should be,” said Rubin, whose tiny following of artists and entertainers has challenged past regulation with mixed success. “It happens by itself.”

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Boosters deny they want to alter the raw-edged magic of a curiosity that can draw 150,000 visitors on busy summer weekends. They argue that renovation, often discussed over the years, is long overdue.

They note that wooden-roofed pagodas have deteriorated to the brink of collapse, while drug dealing and drug use has made bathrooms scary dens.

“We want it to continue to be the carnival,” said Mark Ryavec, the boardwalk association’s executive director and point man for the renovation plan. “There’s a difference between funky and slimy. We want to keep the funky and clean up the slime.”

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The current tug-of-war is the boardwalk’s latest identity crisis since Kinney’s amusement park was dismantled for scrap metal.

Initially, the abandoned neighborhood became better known for drug addicts and pawnshops than family fun. The vacuum was filled in the 1950s by beat poets lured by low rents near the sea and an anything-goes reputation. In the 1960s, the beach took on its now-familiar role as a mecca for the wandering and the weird. Janis Joplin and the Doors hung out there. Anti-war fever was high. Hopes for racial peace were high. And, often, so were the people.

“I had my first LSD ‘Orange Sunshine’ on Venice Beach, and it was a fantastic experience,” said writer Thomas Pleasure, who moved to the beach in 1970 as a community organizer. “We’d have an Argentine filmmaker in the house one month. We’d have an Austrian poet another.

“You could call it a gestation period from the ‘40s to the ‘60s. Then it was like the opening of a cocoon.”

Venice historian Jeffrey Stanton says construction of the beach bicycle path in 1972 spurred the boardwalk’s rebirth as a tourist attraction, eventually shattering the solitude of a beach that had become a favorite for nude sunbathers. Street performers fended off a city crackdown on entertainers in the late 1970s through a now-defunct union led by Jingles. Developers also began remolding the ragtag settlement of hippies and pensioners--a process some critics say has overrun a residential neighborhood with music-blaring stores and bustling parking-lot marketplaces.

“It changed the character of the neighborhood from the edge of the community to an intense commercial atmosphere,” said Steve Schlein, who has lived on the boardwalk since 1975. “It’s just a crude outdoor shopping mall.”

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An economic boom in the 1980s touched off an explosion of new shops and drove rents sky-high--the per-foot retail rates match those of Beverly Hills boutiques--leaving shopkeepers vulnerable when the downturn came two years ago. Businesses have also had to cope with unwanted publicity over the sporadic gang clashes, though the boardwalk saw a peaceful summer.

Now many of the boardwalk’s 150 storekeepers are wondering how long they can survive.

Hwan Song has hit his credit-card limit to pay the $4,400-a-month boardwalk rent on his T-shirt shop. “People come. Still, they don’t spend,” he said. “We’re in trouble.”

Still, many property owners remain sanguine about the future--as long as the city moves to maintain the boardwalk better.

“Our anchor tenant is the Pacific Ocean,” said Albert Elzas, who runs a family trust that owns a new five-store building on the boardwalk. “It isn’t going to go away. In time we will bounce back.”