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.’
