A river, and plenty of history, ran through it

The three-parcel lot Frank Gehry bought, amounting, at 42,000 square feet, to just under an acre, sits at the crest of a slight easterly rise. Venice historian Elayne Alexander will tell you that an ancient river (roughly paralleling Ballona Creek a couple of miles to the south) ran through here and left behind something like bottomland, eventually cultivated for lima beans.

A block south from Gehry’s property, where St. Mark’s parish church and school now sit alongside Coeur d’Alene elementary school, were celery fields.

Nationalistic paranoia at the outset of World War II saw to it that the Japanese immigrants who had worked the land were sent off (there’s a well-known photograph of one such group gathered near the old train line on Venice Boulevard), and the fields gave way to the area’s long, curious development history.

On old plats, the neighborhood is known as “Venice of America extension,” and that’s a good way to think of Abbot Kinney’s sprawling network of water-free add-on -- bordered to the west by the boulevard named for town founder Kinney, to the east by the ugly automotive scrum of Lincoln Boulevard, to the south by what’s called presidents’ row (with street names like Garfield, Van Buren and, of course, Washington) and to the north by Venice Boulevard.

The two central events in the history of the neighborhood are the great frat house blaze of 1970 and the slaying, shortly before noon on Aug. 12, 1969, of Lennon family patriarch Bill Lennon.

A psychopathic stalker who thought Lennon (and President Lyndon Johnson, whose Secret Service detail had once arrested the killer) had kept him from marrying Peggy Lennon, Chet Young was armed with a 30-06 rifle in a gunnysack. Lennon, the father of 11, wrestled Young for the rifle but was overpowered and shot at close range.

Darleen Tripp, who grew up in the small home directly east of the Gehry site, recalls being at the beach with Mimi Lennon when Mimi’s brother found them with the news.

Although most of the families remained, bonded by both proximity and the steadying influence of St. Mark Church (constructed in 1956), an innocence was lost forever.

A second shock was the blaze that leveled a Santa Monica College fraternity house that stood exactly where Gehry plans to break ground.

Tripp recalls her brother Bobby, newly back from Vietnam and recovering from shrapnel wounds, dragging a hose onto the building’s roof in a vain attempt to douse the flames before the firetrucks arrived.

Ten minutes’ walk away, a new Venice was being born along the beach. Artists lured by the cheap studio space they could hammer together from the area’s light-industry warehouses began to move in and transform the onetime resort boomtown into a community that had fresh air and a sense of freedom.

But rough-and-tumble Venice was not for the faint of heart.

“Buildings were coming up for sale for $29,000,” recalls Chuck Arnoldi as he sits in the sprawling studio he occupies with his wife, novelist Katie Arnoldi, “and we didn’t have the money to buy ‘em. We had collector friends and wealthy friends and we’d tell ‘em, and a lot of them bought, but a lot of them didn’t because they were afraid of Venice -- it was sketchy in those days.”

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--Fred Schruers