Added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 9, 2001

Even in the architecturally eclectic Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles, the Venice of America House stands out. Its spindlework balustrade and decorative window transoms mark it as a late period Victorian home, with some colonial revival influence in the hipped roof and narrow clapboard siding. Victorians were rare on the westside; the few homes from that era that remain are craftsman style. But even within the Victorian style, this house is an oddity due to the clear influence of Islamic architecture – check out the arches all over the façade, and that onion-like dome at the top. You half expect a muezzin to appear on the second-floor balcony to call the Venetian Muslim community to prayer.

Now imagine what the Venice of America House must have looked like when it was built in 1906. This was one of the earliest homes erected in Venice. At the time, the house had very few neighbors, and those that did exist back then were mostly single-story bungalows. Postcards from the era show the house standing alone on the north side of the canal, with rows of humble cabins set up on the south. 

Nowadays, the house is chock-a-block with all sorts of other homes on Cabrillo Avenue. But wait – didn’t Cabrillo used to be a canal? Yes indeed. To understand what happened, we need to go back to the origins of Venice. 

Building Venice

The Venice of America House was built by Abbot Kinney, the visionary founder of the “Venice of America” project. Kinney started as a tobacco salesman, traveling the world to import foreign tobacco for his family’s company. But he had asthma (probably the wrong gig for someone with a lung problem, right?), so as many well-to-do easterners did back in the late 19th century, he headed to California in hopes that the clean air and sunshine would clear out whatever ailed him. 

Kinney first set up shop in Sierra Madre, got into real estate during the short land boom of 1887, and hooked up with a business partner named Francis G. Ryan to buy a 1.5 mile long stretch of land right along the beach in Santa Monica. They had big plans to develop a resort community called “Ocean Park,” but Ryan died in 1898, and his widow’s new husband transferred their share of the property to a few businessmen that Kinney didn’t get along with. The partnership dissolved in 1904, and with a flip of a coin, Kinney chose to keep the marshy, undeveloped southern part of the property.

Almost immediately, Kinney and his planners started conceiving a new, even more expansive beachside resort. It would be centered around a business district on Windward Avenue. Hotels, a dance hall, a bowling alley, a casino, even a small ostrich farm lined the amusement pier that extended Windward into the sea. And the pièce de résistance: seven canals (whimsically named Coral, Cabrillo, Venus, Lion, Altair, Aldebaran and Grand) arrayed in a fan shape with a huge lagoon on the west side, and the wedge-shaped “United States Island” on the east side. The Abbot Kinney Corporation planned 504 residential lots in Venice of America, with a bit more than half of them right along the canals. 

The canals themselves were a massive feat of engineering. Kinney hired the Hall Construction Company to dig the canals and lagoon area. It involved emptying the entire area of mud and plants using mule teams and a steam-powered dredging machine. After the canals were dug, Kinney brought onboard a civil engineer named Fremont Ackerman to build a system of underground pipes to circulate fresh saltwater to the canals and lagoon.

Kinney drew his inspiration from two main sources. First, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. The main structures of the fair were built on low-lying marshlands right on the Chicago shoreline. Much of the master plan for Venice of America was built around a similar idea. The second inspiration should be obvious. With the canals and colonnaded Italian renaissance-style buildings that lined Windward, Kinney wanted prospective buyers to feel like they were strolling (or taking a gondola ride) through the real Venice. His homage went further than the aesthetics. He hoped his Venice would become the center of a cultural renaissance, and went so far as to found an arts organization to bring opera, poetry and lectures to a 3400-seat theater that Kinney built.

Hot It All Worked Out

While Kinney’s cultural ambitions for Venice of America didn’t pan out as he had hoped, Venice of America was fabulously financially successful. The lots sold fast at $550 to $1600 a piece –  Nathan Masters reports that 355 of them were gone within two hours of Venice of America’s opening to the public on July 4, 1905. 

Ultimately Kinney’s vision for Venice of America was a victim of its own success. The water was often stinky and polluted due to problems with Ackerman’s circulation system. Civic leaders and business owners wanted to fill in the canals, to make the area more accessible to motorists. Residents resisted, arguing that their property would lose its waterfront appeal (and that they’d have to pay extra property tax for the privilege of losing the canals). Venice was annexed into the city of Los Angeles in 1925, and by the end of 1929, all seven of the original canals were filled in with dirt and paved over, with the lagoon becoming a traffic circle. Three of the new roads, Cabrillo, Altair and Grand, preserved the names of their watery predecessors. 

Today

The six canals that you can currently kayak down in Venice were not part of Kinney’s Venice of America development. They were actually the competition! A couple years before that fateful coin toss, Los Angeles and Pacific Railway owners Moses Sherman & Eli Clark had purchased the land just south of Kinney’s, to develop into a resort of their own. Once Kinney started dredging the land for his canals in 1904, the Ocean Park Improvement Association (I’m assuming this was a group of local property owners) decided it wanted to build canals too and connect them to Kinney’s, so you could ride a gondola all the way from Kinney’s canals, southwest through Ballona Lagoon, and all the way into the ocean at Playa del Rey.

And what of the Venice of America house? There’s not much in the public record about its origin story. We don’t know the architect, though some guess it was the firm of Norman Marsh and Clarence Russell, who designed many of the buildings in the early days of Venice’s business district. We do know that the Abbot Kinney Corporation owned the lot that it was built on, that they rented it for about a decade, and that in 1918 it was sold to John and Emma Fonnell for a $10 gold piece. Mr. Fonnell may or may not be the same German painter who previously owned a Victorian in Angelino Heights. 

Abbot Kinney died in 1920, so thankfully he never got to witness his beloved canals filled in. The remaining Sherman/Clark canals to the south are lovely, especially after their renovation in 1992-93. But I wish we could experience the older ones, connecting at strange angles, with that manmade lagoon bringing it all together, like a giant town square made of water. 

The Venice of America House stands as one of the few residential vestiges from those early days of the canals, a quiet reminder of Kinney’s vision. 

Sources & Recommended Reading

+Venice of America House’s NRHP nomination form 

+Bariscale, Floyd: “No. 207 – Fonnell House” (Big Orange Landmarks, 209)

+Masters, Nathan: “The Lost Canals of Venice of America” (KCET, 2013) 

+Masters, Nathan: “CityDig: When Roller Coasters Replaced Opera in Venice, California” (Los Angeles Magazine, 2013)

+Schatz, Marty: ”The Lost Canals of Venice (Venice Heritage Museum)

+Goldman, Betsy: “2001 – Venice of America House” (betsysellsvenice.com)