On 6 February 1983, the Observer took a tour of Venice – the LA suburb, not the Serenissima. It’s a poetic paean to an outpost of defiant weirdness; a countercultural enclave in a sclerotically gentrified city.
The half-mile of human-made beach was peaceful at dawn, peopled by early joggers, roller-skaters and falafel stall owners getting on with early prep, wrote Clancy Sigal, who had loved the place since 1946, ‘When blind instinct led me, a just-discharged GI, to its shabby waterfront to bake the army blues out of my bones.’ But by mid-morning, ‘Venice is a medieval fair. Nearly nude bathers, bodybuilders, grandmothers on skateboards, paranoid millionaires and dope-smoking bag ladies… alcoholics and crazies and Vietnam vets and runaway kids.’
It wasn’t always that way. Venice was the turn-of-the-century urban fantasy of an east coast cigarette baron, conceived as a tribute to its old-world namesake with a network of canals, imported gondoliers and cultural ambitions: ‘Sarah Bernhardt was persuaded to appear in the local opera house.’ By the 1920s, the project had already lost its lustre, becoming ‘a hard-nut town full of drifters and grafters’. By 1926 it was bankrupt, the canals were filled in and it was handed over to oil companies that reduced it to ‘a smelly industrial park’.
In the 1950s, Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs made it a ‘beatnik hangout’ and by the 1980s its subversive side was so beloved, attempts at gentrification had provoked two firebombings and the destruction of a canalside condo. There’s a sense of Venice being a precious haven, a time warp, a place where anything goes. ‘Venice will give you a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh chance,’ one writer Sigal spoke to said. ‘There’s room to fail here.’
All that contributed to the shabby, showy, boggling spectacle of the place, beautifully captured in Paul Fusco’s sun-soaked pictures. Venice was, as one of the older Jewish ladies who regularly congregated to observe the carnival from a bench declared, ‘As good as the movies.’
