The objective is to produce and publish comprehensive chronologies built around objective social political and cultural categories based upon primary, anecdotal and official written materials, so that the people of the Venice community can re-imagine themselves using the mirror of the past. No overarching narratives are provided.

History of Venice of America Volume #1

History of the Venice Canals: 1850-1939

Preface

The beginning of this issue is clouded in mystery... The Short Line Beach maps are instructive. They indicate that the Title Insurance and Trust Company, Sherman and Clark, and G. Walter Bordwell, played important roles in conceiving the idea of canals to drain, and reclaim, and profit from the Ballona wetlands, so the question is raised, did they have the idea first, or was it Fremont Ackerman? Did he draw the maps for both Kinney, Sherman and Clark, and Bordwell? Was he the master brain behind all of this?

I need to look at kinney's first subdivision, Golden Bay Tract, and uncover the date of its origins. It may be that Kinney began to develop the beach lots first, that Sherman and Clark followed; that the idea for draining swamps or wetlands was all the rage, and that Kinney cannot get the sole credit for all of this.

Author's Preface

This essay on the Venice Canals is the first of a projected series of chronologies which I plan on the past of Venice California. My project, to construct for the first time and, in some cases, to reconstruct the standard components of the history of Venice from primary sources, is meant to culminate in a synthetic History of Venice built upon the micro studies that preceed it. The objective is to satisfy the longing of readers in our culture for stories which describe the way it was and how it got to be that/this way.

The past fascinates us because in it we hope to find signs or portents which explain the present and point the way into the future. A unity between past, present, and future is thus implied in history, so that it is clear that history is one of the elemental cements holding together our culture and social order.

History exists to validate a core morality and mythology upon which all civil society rests. At the same time it searches for and objectifies the collective (public, national, gender, class etc.) 'spirit' in the events which it singles out and memorializes. To be acceptable to school boards, the historical profession, the conditioned reader and the publisher, history must appear to be objective when it is in fact essentially circular and manipulative, focusing as it does on the proof or revision of pre-established and already accepted core myths, patterns, and morals.

In order to be politically acceptable, produced History must gloss over, explain, or excuse the fundamentally oppressionist and exploitive nature of one or the other of the major modern social systems, Capitalism or Socialism. It is not unusual for both systems to be simultaneously justified, since both are accepted as necessary and inevitable by historians. This justification is usually accomplished by recourse to the notion of progress.

On a spiritual level history exists to assure the reader that group (or herd) life is ultimately organized by the principle of order and reason, not chaos. Thus History is indispensible to the formation of social order and collective culture. At the same time as it serves the interests of liberation and empowerment of individuals thru collective interaction, it plants the seeds of slavery, weakness, and oppression. In mature modern societies, (according to Hegel, Nietszche,and even Marx) History serves the function of conservation and reaction.

I have made the following decisions in an attempt to minimize the retrogressive elements inherent in contemporary historicism. I have tried as much as possible to eliminate a continuous narrative from my presentation. And I have relied as much as possible on primary sources, allowing them to speak for themselves with but two mediations; that of the original recorder/teller, and my own initial read of the document and its simultaneous essentialization.

The methodology I have adopted, using only primary sources, aims at minimalizing the importance of previous histories of Venice. The outcome of this approach must be described as revisionist history, that is a revision of our picture of the Venice community's past with reference to core historical myths, (for example progress), based upon the insights which flow from the creation of a large body of rationalized facts. I expect that this methodology will shed a new and different light not only on the history of this unique and very special community, but on the history of Los Angeles City and the Southern California region as well.

I began my research more than fifteen years ago, initially inspired by curiosity, and subsequently by professional and personal considerations. I lived in Venice as a graduate student, became active in community politics and social life, and often heard people remark on how interesting the history of the community was. I was struck by the fact that although people believed that the history was interesting, I could find no professional or to my mind credible written history on this subject. So... curiosity and professional interests influenced my decision to make what turned out to be a major change in my activities as an historian. Trained in European and particularly Russian history, I became more and more involved in researching in a distinct local or community history. My perspective, at that time, was very different from that of most local historians.

I became aware as well that to study the past of the community in which I lived resolved what for me was an existential dilemma. Here I was living in the 1970's in Southern California and studying, researching, and thinking about 18th century Russian intellectual history. I thought I had a far better chance of understanding the place I lived in, Venice, than I had of understanding 18th century Russian history. Living in the place allowed me to feel, to sense it. Of equal import, a huge amount of documentation would be available to me locally. Getting to the Soviet Union and into its archives, let alone penetrating 18th century Russian culture, was more problematic.

My interest peaked, I sought out and read the secondary sources on the history of Venice and neighboring Santa Monica. They were not impressive. Every narrative about the origins and development of Venice was built on the same sparse and problematic factual base. The histories were popular. There were no high academic historicist reconstructions of the local past. It was also clear that no one had engaged in a comprehensive review of the primary documents. With the exception of a few monographs and a single dissertation, no one had made a systematic study of archives or repositories. Comprehensive popularizations focused on the role of Abbot Kinney in the creation of Venice and were clearly rooted in the most elementary historicism of the hero-progenator myth type.

The staring point for all the secondary works was Luther Ingersoll's work on the History of Santa Monica bay, published in 1908. His work covered the origins of settlement in what is today Santa Monica, Venice, and Del Rey, from the origins of settlement in the 19th century to 1907. It was based mostly on his experiences, and clippings taken from the Santa Monica Outlook newspaper.

Ingersoll's work was augmented by other writers who made their own cullings from the newspapers and magazines. These writers produced little more than sketches or summaries of events which were passed off as community history; personalities or events in the saga of ...Santa Monica, Ocean Park, the Soldiers Home,...etc. The factual information presented often could not be verified, there were seldom notes indicating sources. Each author "read" the facts,- the same facts,- to suit his or her own culturally programmed objectives. There was no telling the difference between fact and fiction, between history and fantasy. The transparent subjectivity of such 'history' was obvious. I thought at the time that I could do better.

I began to read the primary documents, local newspapers and government records. I was struck by the richness of the sources. There was a great deal of interesting 'factual' information none of which had been mentioned in the published secondary sources. It seemed reasonable then that if I continued I could create a large body of 'facts' from which I could reconstruct a comprehensive and 'reliable' history of Venice. It would not be an easy task. It would be a long term project.

As I immersed myself in the sources I realized the need to rationalize the disparate information into the traditional subject categories that historians are conditioned to favor; political, social, cultural, economic, biography, minorities, amusements, sewers, radicals ,etc. I rationalized the information gathering process through the creation of roughly two dozen categories within which I began to squirrel away the 'facts'.

Years passed. I plodded on. I became dull. People asked me what I had learned. The longer I worked at the project the more people began to consider me an expert. I was a professional, practicing historian, wasn't I? Couldn't I tell them stories about this or that? I resisted. I told them I couldn't. I was collecting information. The assessment of the information for its meaning had to await the completion of the initial gathering task. It was impossible I told them for me to make any sense out of these facts, to connect them together, to rationalize them as narrative. I focused only on building a reliable and sufficient data base. If I collected facts by subject, and organize them chronologically, I could, I reasoned, ultimately sit back and let them make sense to me. The past of Venice would reveal itself only when there was a sufficient data base. In the absence of a documented factual continuity I could not make the past into history.

In creating a chronologically organized data base of facts about Venice History, subj History of Venice, I thought to create an objective body of stuff from which I could draw, and which presumably, would validate and legitimate any of the synthetic perspectives which float within the dominant culture; marxism, feminism, various forms of bourgeois ideology, etc.

As I continued my note taking I found myself 'essentializing' documents or parts of documents to highlight and give meaning to 'the facts' which caught my attention. Each 'essentialization' took the from of a paraphrased condensation of a story presented in the primary source.

It was clear that the facts in and of themselves were symbols which were energized and made meaningful by the story context in which they were located. That is, the fact was part of a subject and part of a story. The subject and the story were not always identical. I began to wrap each fact in a vignette which essentialized that fact, in the absence of which the fact was open to a myriad of meaning and at the same time meant nothing!

I didn't think about what perspective(s) I would use to synthesize the stuff contained in each of the categories. But it was clear that I couldn't help but be prejudiced and opinionated in the selection of facts and in their 'essentialization'. I was already looking at the material from perspective, synthesizing it as I paraphrased it. To make matters worse, it was clear that the 'facts' that I was in the process of collecting had already been synthesized by the person who had recorded them, and that they were again being synthesized and in that sense distorted by me a second time!!! My synthesis constituted yet another mediation between the past and the reader. Each interpretation or mediation could also be seen as a distortion!

There was a second problem. The signification of any single factual category could not be constructed outside of its omnibus local context. I could not create a synthetic story about say, the Venice Canals, without assembling and reviewing the collected data on all the other Venice categories. I couldn't begin to rationalize the meaning of any single subject in the absence of an entire corpus of assembled data on the components of Venice history.

An extensive data base had to be assembled, category by category, then synthesized, before any credible comprehensive community history could be articulated. But such an articulation would be based on what was inevitably a myriad of interpretations or distortions. The paraphrased essentializtions were subjective interpretations and distortions themselves. The more synthetic a story, the more suspect its rationalized meaning.

There was yet another problem. Could the history of the Venice community be understood with out folding it into the already written and therfore existing history of Los Angeles and Southern California? I had to interpret the facts I had collected in the light of what was 'on the shelves' relative to the history of Los Angeles. Could the history of Venice, whether in its individual categories or as a whole, be written using the extant secondary sources on the region's history?

Any historian who reviews the secondary materials on Los Angeles City or County cannot but question the usefulness of most of what has been written about meaning and causation in Los Angeles history. First there has been no systematic review of primary sources. Second the published and archived materials and are uneven. Third they represent a myriad of individual consciousnessess, sensitivities, world views, framed and validated by myth. ideology, and varieties of culture.

It was apparent that no reliable, legitimate, objective, regional or municipal historical context had been created within which I could embed the various elements of Venices past, thus vesting it with broader meaning.

At this point the creation of a written narrative on Venice history seemed problematic.

The growing realization that there was trouble in paradise, i.e. the increasing suspicion of historical narrative itself-- which grew out of my own experiences-- was reinforced and validated for me by recent critical theory. I familiarized myself with the critique of narrative history offered by Sande Cohen in his work, Historical Culture.

I reviewed the work of Derrida (on deconstruction) and Lyotard, in particular his Post Modern Condition, and applied their approaches and critique to some of the most formidable of European historical literature, to see if these could withstand deconstruction. Only Richard Cobbs' meticulously detailed study of the Peoples Armies during the French Revolution survived the crucible of deconstruction, and that because its subject was so narrow and its hypothesis so limited.

If telling stories about the was part of the problem, how could any objective history be written? The answer to this question is that none can.

Still, as long as human beings retain their fascination with the past, stories about it will be written.

My aim, in presenting the materials I have collected on the past of the Venice community, about Venices' past, is to be as manipulation free as I possibly can,... so that the reader can fantasize about the past, look for inklings of answers to the questions on his mind, speculate on the nature and meaning of things.

History, it turns out, has nothing to do with science or scientific method. Rather it is more about aesthetics, morality, about philosophy, about psychology, about pathology and mythology and ideology and neurosis.

History is about human beings reflecting on, acting and reacting to their condition. It is an exercise in discovery through the application of systematic rationalization; it is an ongoing evolution of individual consciousness speculating on the meaning of existence.

Writing about the past should encourage such speculation and
imagination. It should discourage passive mythologizing, while reflecting that given human imperfectability, inevitably, necessarily, human beings will insist on, make, and succumb to myth.

But rather tan present the myths so as to serve the regressive function of passive re-enforcement, the historian might encourage the reader to imagine at every moment, coincident with the presentation of a minimally distorted set of factual materials. In such a way the reader, who naturally seeks meaning, can find it himself!

Any encounter with the past should surprise, wonder, and unleash a host of emotions and questions in the reader. Thus, in being absorbed by the past in the present, the reader perceives not a thing, or things as facts, but a deceptively static yet regulated progression of facts in time. With these facts the reader must play. In essence, the history book should be a vehicle through which the reader engages in a very particular process of simultaneous discovery of past and self. The process requires attention, imagination, sympathy. It involves curiosity.

All of these conditions need to be awakened in the reader if the past is to serve its purpose, which is nothing else than to enlighten and energize the reader, and through him, the time in which he is an actor on this planet.

-----------------

The Venice canals were an obvious subject of my research. Canals were synonymous with Venice Italy. It is universally agreed, but not indisputably true, that it was Abbot Kinney who made them synonymous with Venice,
California.

In envisioning a speculative development Kinney is said to have hit upon the idea of replicating old Venice in the new, Little Italy of Southern California. He appropriated the myth of European Venice in order to glamorize his speculative real estate venture, to make money, to enrich himself, to sell his development project. After all where would one rather live or own property, - in a reclaimed wetland, or on the banks of Imperial Venice?

The Venice Canals made Venice of America possible. The canals drained the wetlands and thus made possible Kinney's chancy real estate venture. The Canals were central to the exploition of the Ballona Wetlands as real estate. They were initially and at once practical and aesthetic and cultural, romantic and archaic.

The Canals retained their significance over time. For one thing they were successful in attracting tourists and prospective homeowners to the new municipality. Venice grew up residentially around the Canals.

Speaking practically they didn't always function well; they didn't always fulfill their initial functional objectives. Venice was often inundated by floodwaters, and the water in the Canals often stagnated. But in a more fundamental sense they were successful as symbol; romantic, different, fantasy like, a playful exception to the reality of the dawning age of industrial capitalism and the smugness of bourgeois culture and values.

By 1912 the Canals already seemed to some people to stand in the way of progress. The automobile age coincided with the birth of Venice, but it had not been park of Kinney's utopian imagination.

Canals were not useful in this modern new age, some argued, and they had to go. But many Venetians, perhaps a majority, agreed with Abbot Kinney that the canals should always be retained and maintained as canals. It was both nostalgia and commitment to the Founder's Dream. It was identification with a romantic past within a cosmopolitan context. It was resistance to the Modern.

The Canals became a local and regional symbol of romantic opposition to 'progress', an alternative to the image spread by the dominant culture of Los Angeles in particular, and Southern California in general. People in Venice chose sides. The struggle over the canals escalated to social drama and spilled over into municipal, regional, and state politics.

The Venice Canals, born of the speculative imagination of developers
eager to turn a profit, helped set the tone for the overall image of the ommunity which grew up around them, a bold, romantic, contrary, innovative, adventurous, audacious symbol. That symbol has stuck. Venice today is known world wide as a community where an alternative way of life and culture exists and can be experienced. 'Live and Be Free in Venice' is the way this idea was captured in a bumper sticker produced in the 1970's.

Contemporary Venice is a counter cultural symbol which is broadcast
regularly by the media. That it is broadcast signifies that it has been captured and appropriated, that it is useful to the dominant culture.

The Canals themselves have now been gentrified for the first time in their existence. Colonized by increasingly wealthy and culturally mainstreamed people who thrive on the appropriated sybbol of opposition and uniqueness but who are in fact the very enemies of the stuff of the symbol itself, the Canals in particular and, in fact the very Idea of Venice, has been appropriated by the media into the dominant culture.

Today the broadcast idea of Venice is in fact what the postmodernist
thinker Baudrillard has referred to as a simulacra. It is not a real 'Venice' but only appears to be. The appropriation of alternative symbols through actual physical appropriation,-- and the manipulation of imagery by the media which serves the dominant culture, effectively neutralize by cooption any symbols in which to root oppositional fantasies. This is important because it is in fantasy that opposition to what is, is born.

Appropriation of oppositional symbols by the grand monadism of the dominant culture represents a strategy which is simultaneously conservative, reactionary, and oppressive, because it aims at maintaining the system (What I) against internally generated threats stemming from the massive
contradictions objectified by its very own definition and organization of social life.

Thus, although Venice symbology as projected by the media represents opposition politically (self rule, community control, community first, municipality second, national third, for example); socially (multi raced, cultured, incomed); spiritually (rebellious, oppositional, eccentric, aesthetic, free, anarchic, playful, dangerous), the appropriationist
strategy actually only produces the suggestion of opposition, promoting only a potential reality by projecting and reifying -This Image.

In the reality of bourgeois capitalist national life any attempts to objectify such oppositional symbols by reconstituting them as the dominant culture and its institutions-- must be considered naive, utopian, and absurd.

In reality, oppositional symbols like Venice are promoted; they give rise to fantasy, and individuals and groups are spurred by fantasies such as Venice to consider reconstitution of social life and the dominant culture which is its reflection.

The function of fantasy is to give hope. And hope is especially important when faith in progress and a positive social future for humanity has all but disappeared from the current post modern intellectual scene.

But these fantasies, which generate hope, are in fact not dangerous to the status quo. Rather, they support it! Confined to individuals and small community groups or alienated intellectuals these symbols are projected as signifiers of hope and the possibility of change to the masses of people in the region, country, and throughout the world.

In this smorgasbord - Venice symbolism is homogenized and blended, so that it is neutralized even as it is promoted, thus becoming part of the problem.

At the same time the dominant culture view, projected by all legitimate
or establishment media, (nationalist, socialist, capitalist, feminist, etc.) reflects the ideological prejudices of modernism, insuring that global and national symbols will always take precedence over regional and local symbols in attracting the allegiance and inspiring loyalty in myriads of
individuals.

Venice oppositional symbolism is allowed to remain, even promoted as nostalgia,.. and in this way promotes the status quo by supporting the view of the system as permissive, tolerant, open minded, and changeable.

Eventually and inevitably, all alternative symbols are in fact appropriated, effectively neutralized, turned into simulacra, and continue to exist as fantasy which will never be anything but romantic and utopian as long as Modernism, whether capitalist or socialist in form, continues to dominate the production of images which are appropriated and disseminated by the mass media,.. and as long as power elites continue to pursue, as a matter of faith or inertia, a Modernist agenda for nation, world, and humanity.

Modernism then, represents a single cultural strategy vis a vis social life which encourages dreams of opposition, liberation, and thus salvation while it simultaneously renders their actualization impossible. Venice is consequently promoted. Actualization in concrete political, social, and cultural ways, can never go much beyond the dream if the images are to remain impotent and demonic simulacra.

Under such circumstances it is clear that any History of Venice which seeks to reaffirm the oppositional nature of Venice is feeding appropriation and is part of the problem.

A History of Venice, or a History of anything, is problematic in the light of this hypothesis concerning the role, function, and fate of oppositional symbols such as Venice. Why write history if it serves only and effectively the purposes of what is? If What Is is the Death Wish?

The Post Modern perspective does not embrace the notion that progress (improvement in the human condition) can be achieved thru either capitalist or socialist organization and ethics. With Modernism bankrupt and in bad there is no longer an acceptable ethical, moral, or spatial context within which to root story, or history: The rationalized story of a past. We do not know, and can not know for sure, where we are coming from and where we are going. All historicism (rationalized story about the past) pre-supposes such a context. All historicism, to be accepted as acceptable, must be culture specific bound, to be coherent.

I have tried, consequently, to make this presentation on the Venice Canals and the people and events associated with them as 'minimalist' as possible.

I have decided not to construct a continuous narrative or story. I do not think historical narrative is a 'progressive' from in today's world. Any narrative discourse concerning a past ideologizes and culturizes it in thoroughly distinctive ways which primarily serve to distort that past as it is perceived by individuals, groups, classes, nations, genders, etc.

However in the real world it is necessary to compromise. A purist approach as outlined above might appeal to the academic or ideologue, but not to the average reader. Why appeal to the average reader? Not Democracy. Only Hope. The average reader is conditioned to require that a context be presented within which facts are presented and understood. Historians must perform this function. This function is culturally conditioned. It results in mass cultural programming and serves a clear political function.

I have tried to imagine a different way.

Using my paraphrases,- 'essentializations', 'vignettes',.. I have created a minimalist foundation or context within which to embed the paraphrased chronology that follows it. The illusion of obiective substance that an embedding foundation or matrix implies is necessary for the resder who wants to take seriously his quest for meaning in the past. If this quest is presented as unserious, as play, most people would find the exercise, the pursuit of meaning in the past, to be at best a frivolous exercise. That is why in our culture history cannot be described as primarily creative, as art.

The embedding context I have created is still leading and manipulative.
That this is obvious represents an important advantage to the reader who is at least told beforehand of the danger. Having prepared the reader I move as quickly as possible away from the presentation of a narrativized context and begin about 1904, the year in which the Canals were built, to present a chronologically ordered sequence of selected paraphrases of decoded documents.

I make no attempt here to present the reader with another synthesis, a
homogenized story. There are of course many stories, many plots, many interesting episodes which are presented to the reader as she moves thru the chronology. How could this be otherwise? I alone decoded and paraphrased the documents and consequently the decoded paraphrases reflect a single, evolving, rationalizing, consciousness.

It is left to the reader to discover and imagine these stories, and therefore the meaning of the paraphrased artifacts. It is not my objective to recreate the past as story or myth, or to tell the reader what the story means or what the past teaches. It is to 'plug the reader in' to the materials which constitute story so she/he can imagine it themselves.

To create a feeling of community... as a context within which the past of the Venice Canals is presented, I have chosen to weave (capriciously, emotionally, consciously) into this paraphrased chronology a splash of paraphrased facts or vignettes representative of the twenty odd themes/subjects on which I have collected, decoded, paraphrased information about Venice past.

My long term objective is to create a like chronology for each theme/subject, encouraging the reader's consciousness, encouraging speculation and fantasizing by withholding expected intellectual and emotional crutches, and by refusing to repeat or validate modernist historicist myths about 'history', leaving it up to the reader, as much as possible, to decide what the past means.

As the Venice Story unfolds, so will the consciousness of the reader. The only intellectual game important here is the process. My intent, as I gathered my paraphrased decodings, was to be disinterested and as non pre-directed as possible, as objective as consciousness permitted in the world of multiple culturally certified truths.

But no historian can get around subjectivity for all that. One cannot escape the limits of culture, gender, class, race, or genetics. There is no, there can be no, objective History. History is pernicious when projected as Truth.

It is nevertheless inevitable that readesr will attempt to rationalize the Venitian past. Certain paraphrases will be picked up and appropriated by others. These paraphrases will be objectified and legitimated through repitition. Myths about origins, causation, ends, will inevitably be created. Others will even appropriate these paraphrases to create a"History of Venice".

It is more 'useful', more comfortable to have History than to have something as intangible as intellectual process. My objective will be negated . Still, to tempt readers with the idea of a rationalized past is to encourage disaster, but at the same time liberation and creativity. I hope that this introduction will encourage resistance to the standard desire to rationalize the past in a beginnings/ends vice/vise.

In sum, my purpose in producing this thematic/subject focused chronology, is to present the reader with an alternative to traditional narrative history. I read narrative to be a leading, manipulative device, a coda and process which hides and codes cultural, ideological, or pathological perceptions.

The first section of this book then is a simple chronology of once removed paraphrases of the documents. In the absence of a grand narrative, the chronology itself assumes the place of the narrative. This methodology does not insure objectivity, but it does ensure the reader that he/she is experiencing the 'facts' just twice removed - my consciousness and that of the document's author.

My objective was to get as close to the event and time as possible by "fraging" the documents; excising, thru direct quote or paraphrase, the "essence" or "meaning" or "spirit" in the document without resorting to additional interperation or integration, that is to analysis. I consciously avoided immersing myself in the extant secondary, interpretive historical literature so as to avoid its influences. Inevitably readers of this work will "see" a reason or reasons which explain the course of events presented here. The 'reason' they see however is not objective or real, but rather the implied and patterned reflection of my own evolving consciousness appropriated, internalized, and integrated into their own evolving understand of-- 'what is real'. What these facts mean is open to endless varieties of legitimate perception, speculation, and rationalization.

Arnold Springer
Venice California 1992

TO ORDER:

History of the Venice Canals and History of Venice Politics is available Book #1) at: Equator Books Abbot Kinney Blvd Venice CA, or send a check or money order for $10 to Ulan Bator Foundation. PO Box 3059 Venice CA. 90294. We will mail you the book by Priority Mail.

For more information, feel free to contact the Foundation at 
aspringer@ulanbatoronline.org