The Vanishing of Venice (1938)
By Charles Harris (Brick)
Garrigues
The Santa Barbara earthquake
of 1925 lasted forty seconds. the Los Angeles quake of 1933 lasted about eighty
seconds. The Saint Francis Dam disaster was over in seven hours. The Santa
Monica Bay disaster has lasted twenty years and will last another twenty unless
steps are taken to stop it.
Sand is an interesting thing. Each week
between May and September approximately a million residents of Los Angeles
County drive or ride from five to fifty miles to spend an hour or two or three
lying upon it or in the water. Nobody ever thinks of where it came from or where
it is going. It is just there. And then some season they find that their
favorite beach is gone.
In the
mountains and steep cliffs to the north of Santa Monica Bay the sand is made.
Each winter, tons of it are carried down from the canyons between Topanga and
Point Mugu. Day after day, night after night, the waves shift the sand
southward, an inch at a time, past Santa Monica, past Ocean Park, past Venice,
Del Rey, the South Bay Cities, until it is dragged into a huge subterranean
chasm off the coast at Redondo.
Watch
the waves rolling in, at a forty-five degree angle, but they roll out
perpendicularly. As a wave strikes the beach, it stirs up the sand, holding it
for a few minutes in suspension. During those few seconds, the entire mass of
water has moved an inch or two southward; when the sand is deposited again, it
has moved infinitesimally down the
coast.
Not many remember the
magnificence of the Playa Del Rey of thirty years ago -- the pavilion built on
the sea, the long, broad lagoon, protected by locks, where the “smart
set” of the day came (driving down in carriages) for boating, canoeing and
swimming.
That pavilion, with its
piling and its jetties, started the destruction of the Del Rey beach. For the
piers created a “dead area” in the surf -- an area the waves did not
empty. And so the sand began to pile up north of the pier, and the beach to the
south began to suffer a “sand famine” as its own supply was swept
southward.
Not many, for that matter,
remember the Venice of a few years later -- the model city of the day, laid out
by that strange old romantic realist, Abbot Kinney, in an attempt to incorporate
into one American town the best, the most colorful, the most glamorous -- and
perhaps the worst -- of half a dozen of the most colorful cities of the New
World.
Upon the completion of Venice,
something happened to the Venice beach, exactly the same thing that had happened
in Playa Del Rey: The construction of the Kinney pier and breakwater cut off the
supply of sand south of the pier. For two miles, waves gouged at the narrow sand
bar which is the city of Venice, biting further and further
inland.
In 1916 the first disaster
came. Twenty-eight houses were swept into the sea. Thousands of feet of beach
were destroyed. The physical disaster of Venice had begun -- a disaster without
loss of life but surely destroying a city. For Venice is not built upon solid
earth, but upon a sand bar. Let that bar be eaten away and the sea will sweep
in, pouring into the lagoons and canals below sea level and backing up the
swamps half a dozen miles toward Culver
City.
In 1933 another major step in the
tragedy: Santa Monica built a yacht harbor. A long breakwater was thrown into
the sea three miles north of Venice. A new dead area was created at the Venice
beach, a vast sand trap sufficient to hold all the sand moving down the coast
for fifty years to come.
Such is the
slow destruction of Venice. About Venice future generations will not ask
“Why didn’t somebody tell somebody?” but “Why
didn’t somebody do something?”
And the answer to that, of course, is
Greed.
If Venice had been a wealthy
city like Santa Monica, it is probable that somebody might have done something.
But the mistake of Abbot Kinney, the failure to foresee the effects of the
automobile, took its toll. Cut off from the rest of the world, with no better
highway than a twenty-foot alley, Venice became a city of Poverty.
Unlike Santa Monica or Santa Barbara,
it did not have scores of wealthy influential citizens ready to battle for its
future. The hundreds of thousands who came weekly to bathe on its beach did not
live in or own property there. And so Venice slipped backward while its people
vainly attempted to find some way of blasting a road through the
city.
Here, too, they were defeated by
Greed. But it was their own, dog-in-the-manger sort of
Greed.
Everybody was agreed it should
be built on one of three
routes:
• Along the Trolleyway
where the interurban railway
ran.
• Along the narrow alley
(known with official humor as the
“Speedway”).
• Or in
the middle of the block between the
two.
The problem was that from 415 to
432 parcels of private property would have to be condemned -- and paid for -- if
one of these routes were chosen.
The
city and the county of Los Angeles joined to study the problem. The federal
government weighed in.
They came up with an
answer:
• Run the road right down
the ocean front, along public
property.
• Between Santa Monica
and Del Rey, build a series of groynes (narrow, semi-submerged piers) into the
sea, to prevent the sand from being washed
away.
• From the dunes south of
Del Rey, where Uncle Sam was dumping four million cubic yards of sand into the
sea to construct a sewage treatment plant, pump enough sand to fill out Venice
Beach to the desired width.
The entire
project could be completed by this method for two million dollars less than it
would cost to get a highway, plus beach protection, by any other
route.
The money was provided in the
county budget. And then, from a new quarter, there bobbed up our old friend,
Greed.
The years had brought to Venice
a different atmosphere. Sideshows and ten-cent amusements had given way to a new
industry – the tango business. (Tango is one of those amusements on the
borderline of the law – sometimes legal, sometimes illegal, depending on
the interpretation of the statutes.
)
Into the plan to protect Venice was
injected a war between those who controlled Venice – the tango operators
– and the heirs of Abbot
Kinney.
The Los Angeles City playground
department wanted the site of the Venice pier for a major recreational area,
with baths, solariums and concert halls. The Abbot Kinney Company wanted to sell
to the city.
But that would have meant the
destruction of the tango kings determined to keep their
pier.
John Harrah, former mayor of
Venice when it was an independent city, was one of the top tango operators. He
knew how public officials can be controlled. He knew that Supervisor John Anson
Ford, a bitter foe of the tango kings, couldn’t be touched by threats or
promises. But he had a plan.
Very
quietly he retained an attorney named Gilchrist who happened to be a relative by
marriage of District Attorney Buron Fitts. Harrah promised him a fee of ten
thousand dollars if he succeeded in blocking the
program.
And so
–
The county grand jury, always
under the influence of the district attorney, suddenly announced an
investigation of the proposed sale.
But it was never begun. It
didn’t need to be. The announcement alone was enough to convince
Supervisor Ford that something was wrong. He announced that he would oppose the
entire program and indicated that anybody voting for it was probably working for
the “corrupt interests which control
Venice.”
His announcement was
enough to swing Supervisor Herbert C. Legg also into the opposition. Legg was
running for governor and could not afford to take a
chance.
Supervisor Gordon McDonough,
who gets the jitters every time the grand jury is mentioned, slipped out of town
on one of his junkets just before the purchase was to be
consummated.
The pier purchase was
permitted to die -- and with it there died the whole Venice protection
program.
It was not until several
months later that the real method by which the tango business was perpetuated
began to come into the open.
For Harrah
refused to pay Gilchrist his promised fee. Gilchrist went to court and sued the
tango king. Harrah based his defense on the claim that the fee was to have been
for the improper “influencing” of public officials and was
consequently illegal.
The case is
still being fought in the courts, and the testimony is revealing the whole story
of how Greed blocked the protection of
Venice.
And the Vanishing of Venice
continues. Only when it is too late will the cry go up: “Why didn’t
somebody tell
somebody?”
Abridged
from Why Didn’t Somebody Tell Somebody?, a pamphlet published by Los
Angeles newspaperman Charles Harris (Brick) Garrigues in May 1938 and
republished in January 1939.
Posted: Tue - July 1, 2003 at 07:12 PM