#ArchiTalks 32 "eureka!!!!!

eureka!!!!!

Venice Beach or Venice of America was designed by architects Moses Sherman and Eli Clark and founded by Abbott Kinney on July 4, 1905, and was a vacation destination meant to emulate Venice, Italy with the canals and was meant to be a tourist destiantion for people who lived in Pasadena and Los Angeles.. Hundreds of vacation bungalows and tents were built and erected to accommodate the tourists and vacationers.  In fact some of the tents were only made more permanent by framing and siding over and plastering the inside and when work was done years later the canvas was discovered.  The advent of the car instead of the initial railway and the difficulty of navigating through water everywhere in a boat and across bridges, the canals soon became filled in. However, Eureka!!!  Oil was discovered and it became a lot less pleasant to vacation in an oil field and people went to Santa Monica instead.   

In the 50’s and 60’s, Venice became an enclave for mostly European immigrants and young counterculture artists, poets, and writers, including the Beat Generation.  Then the 70’s came and the city decided to clean up the area and then in the 80’s people in the entertainment industry started developing projects with Los Angeles architects, Frank Gehry did a triplex with Denis Hopper and Morphosis did several projects including the restaurant  72 market street owned by Tony Bill, who also owned a house in the area.  

In 1989, my architect boyfriend and I moved to Venice Beach, we rode our bikes to where we worked nearby (there was never any parking anywhere).  We paid twice as much in rent as we had to our last landlord (my boyfriend’s mother) but the new ones Dick and Michele never used their key to enter on a Saturday morning adn we didn’t have the 3 hour round trip commute like we had so it was well worth it.  

We got married, had a baby, moved next door and I got a studio down the street with a friend and opened my first architecture office.  We enjoyed living and working in the area.  There were always little things that native Venetians complain about like how the boardwalk would be gentrified if they repaved it with bricks or how they didn’t want Starbucks to be anywhere on the boardwalk or Abbott Kinney because of the negative effect it might have on the small biz coffeehouses in the area.

Unfortunately, as more architects designed projects, the buildings that went up started charging big rents and high priced real estate.  And to our own detriment, one day after our second baby was born, the new management company gave me a letter that increased the rent 100% effective within 30 days, so I moved out and moved the business into the 700 square foot bungalow we were renting.  And then a year later when we realized that the escalating housing prices had no end in sight, we decided to move to San Diego, specifically La Mesa, wehre we could buy a home and send our children to public school.  That was in July 1999.  

And everyone would say when we moved here (for me it was back down here)

“Wow, so La Mesa is a lot different than Venice, isn’t it?

Which is kindof why we did it.  But it was a bittersweet goodbye, because along with the lifestyle of living in Venice Beach, we also gave up a lot of the creativity that we had grown used to.  We knew artists and architects and knew the Venice after dark wehen the tourists had gone home and it wasn’t “oh, it’s so crazy up there” that people kept talking about when we referred to our previous life.   

We went back several times but we got busy with our new home and the kids were in school, we had another baby less than a year after we bought the house that we said was the five year house that we are still living in now.  

My son wanted to go visit an art school this past weekend, so we drove up and wen tto the open house and then afterwards, I said, “let’s go to Venice Beach adn see the old house and the studio and Abbott Kinney Blvd…..

Well, the past several times, we  noticed that things were changing, the area was indeed going througha transitional phase, no longer were there as many little thrift shops and the cars seemed to have owners who were a lot less worried about driving them into the neighborhood, even though they were really expensive…. Yes, the gentrification was starting and i didn’t seem to mind much because the bones of the place was still there, it was still Venice and the Venice that I recognized.

I drove down Abbott Kinney Blvd., between Venice Blvd. and Main Street and I pulled a right onto California Ave., waited for a couple as they said that they would be a while s they changed their baby in the back of their Prius and pulled in, got out, locked the doors, witnessed a fight on the street, same old Venice, rounded the corner and went to walk into Abbot’s Habit, and

The door was locked.

And there was paper in the windows…

And the coffeehouse that I had visited since it opened in 1994 was closed.

The boys and I walked down the street and looked for another place to have coffee and something to eat and as we dodged people who were packed on the street, I realized that this was not the same place anymore, it was a newer Venice, a lot less gritty Venice, a new an dshiny and extremely high end Venice.

As we crossed the street at Westminster Ave., I expected that my old studio would now be a three story mixed use structure with a high end boutique on the ground floor and a $4 million.penthouse above.

But alas, there it was, my old studio in the old building, exactly as it was when I had been in it 23 years before.  

Then, we went down Riviera Ave., and made a left at Riato and walked up to the door of our old landlord’s house that was next door to the vacation bungalows we had left on July 3, 1999 and knocked on the door.  Michele was there and she invited us in and we talked and saw her painting studio and she told us her friend Betty was in Mallorca for a documentary screening of a film about her life as a sculptor at 81 years of age.  

I asked her, “where can we get a cup of coffee now?” and she said, “oh, we go to Tom’s shoes now”  

We said our goodbyes and made our way back to the car, stopping for coffee at Tom’s and then I said, “let’s go get a slice of pizza for you guys at Abbot’s Pizza and we did and I talked to the owner and he said, “you look familiar and I said, well we used to live here and he said, “oh ya, where di dyou move to? And I said, “we moved to San Diego “ adn he said, “when ?”

And I said, in July of ‘99 and he said, “I know so many creative people who moved away then, that was the right time to leave….”

Eureka!  I have found it!

https://vimeo.com/235603462

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This is my Eureka! If you want to read other Eureka moments, please follow the links below...

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MGHarchitect: Michele Grace Hottel, Architect

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-->Michele Grace Hottel - Michele Grace Hottel, Architect (@mghottel)
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-->Jeffrey Pelletier - Board & Vellum (@boardandvellum)
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-->Keith Palma - Architect's Trace (@cogitatedesign)
Naked in the Street


-->Jim Mehaffey - Yeoman Architect (@jamesmehaffey)
Eureka
-->Mark Stephens - Mark Stephens Architects (@architectmark)
Eureka moments and what do if clients don't appreciate them