Anxiety in Venice : Debate Over the Financially Sagging Boardwalk’s Future Intensifies

From his chair on the Venice Boardwalk, Walt Davis senses an unhappy change in the air.

Maybe it is the numbing din from more and more amplified musicians, said Davis, who has drawn caricatures at the beach for five years. Maybe it is the cutthroat competition for the prime performance spaces. Maybe, he said, it is that some of the best entertainers have moved on to more lucrative spots, such as Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade.

“The magic’s not really there anymore,” said Davis. “People feel it.”

Davis is not the only one worrying about the boardwalk’s 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. Shopkeepers still bemoan worldwide publicity over gang fighting that led police to close the beach one afternoon last spring. And many boardwalk habitues grumble that fly-by-night vendors have converted the kooky performance strip into a glorified flea market of cheap incense, churros and cut-rate T-shirts.

No one expects Venice’s year-round street fair to fold up its tent any time soon. But the malaise has boosted interest in two coming battles over the boardwalk’s identity--a planned $10-million make-over and a push to curb sales in the city-owned parkland on the seaside edge of Ocean Front Walk, as the boardwalk is officially known.

The renovation debate begins tonight with a community meeting pitting a broad grouping of owners, merchants and residents against local bohemians and others who see the make-over as an attempt to gentrify the boardwalk and rein in the chaotic spirit that draws tourists in the first place.

“They tried to change the flavor of Coke and there was a big uprising. I think that’s what’s happening here,” said boardwalk activist Jerry Rubin, who opposes a refurbishment plan sketched by the Venice Boardwalk Assn. and the Venice Action Committee.

That plan--to be paid for with a $10-million county bond issue for Venice Beach approved in 1992--would give the boardwalk an antique look: brick paving, decorative lighting and a restoration of the wooden sunshades to evoke Venice founder Abbot Kinney’s turn-of-the-century amusement park. It also would create a series of small performance areas along the edge of the boardwalk and add a paved beach path for walkers and skaters, who now clog the bicycle path.

The plan also calls for the demolition of the idle Venice Pavilion, a former theater whose fate has been the subject of bitter fights in the past.

Opponents led by Rubin are advancing an alternative proposal--one without the stylish brickwork or performance pockets. They are seeking to resurrect the 600-seat pavilion and create a roller-skating area nearby. Recreation officials already plan to spend about $3 million of the bond issue to restore the storm-damaged Venice Pier, closed in 1986.

Planners from the Department of Recreation and Parks have largely endorsed the merchants’ proposed refurbishment but want more study on the question of brick paving, which critics say would drive away the roller skaters who have helped make the boardwalk a trademark of fun in the sun. The city’s Board of Recreation and Park Commissioners will meet later in the month to decide the exact shape of the make-over.

A second battle looms over 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 nonprofit groups to register with the city before selling merchandise and has proposed limiting any group to a six-foot space. Performers would not be affected. A multi-agency city task force is expected to propose new rules to the recreation board later this month.

Jewelry and clothing shop owner Pierre Khoury said he is losing business to a Rastafarian sect member selling T-shirts at a 20-foot table across from the 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.”

The differing visions of the boardwalk are also fueling a clash over the need to market one of Southern California’s largest tourist attractions, now facing competition from rivals including the Third Street Promenade, Universal CityWalk and Old Pasadena.

“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.”

Boardwalk merchants report that sales have dropped by a third. Some are crossing their fingers and hoping that the World Cup soccer tournament’s stopover in Los Angeles this summer will change their luck. Jordan Monkarsh watched sales drop 20% last year at his Jody Maroni’s Italian Sausage Kingdom outlet on the boardwalk--even as business boomed at the company’s store at CityWalk, a private outdoor mall connected to Universal Studios.

The new push to manage the 1.5-mile boardwalk--which stretches from the Santa Monica border south to Washington Boulevard--began last year when landlords and some of the boardwalk’s 150 restaurant and shop owners lobbied successfully for more police to cope with crowd control and scattered gang activity. They also won parking spaces for tour buses. Some boardwalk observers see the renovation and the bid to tighten rules as a way to turn the strip into an upscale mall for yuppies and complete gentrification that has converted low-rent apartments into shops since the 1970s.

“It doesn’t make sense to spend $10 million to create a playground for the rich,” said Susan Weinberg, a Santa Monica artist who has lived at the boardwalk and helped draw up the alternative renovation proposal. “It’s all about money.”

The first hint of boardwalk regulation--even the mere creation of performers’ pockets--is enough to inspire doomsday talk among Venice’s free spirits.

“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.”

Boardwalk association members deny wanting to polish away the raw magic of a curiosity that can draw 150,000 visitors on busy summer weekends. They say the renovation, discussed often over the years, is simply long overdue--as evidenced by the decrepit condition of wooden-roofed pagodas and neglected bathrooms.

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

The identity crisis is keenly watched by storekeepers laboring with sagging business under boardwalk rents that soared during the boom years of the 1980s. Merchants like Hwan Song, who hit his credit card limit to cover a $4,400 monthly rent payment, puts it bluntly: “We’re in trouble.”

Davis, the caricature artist, supports the full-scale renovation as one way to recover glory days that he says have gone by.

“We’d like to go back to the magic, when people would stay all day and really participate,” he said. “And spend money.”