The Canal Festivals 1969-75: Fighting City Hall Venice Style
By Ann
Arens
Each year from 1969 through 1975,
the Venice Canal community threw a party attracting thousands of people from
across Los Angeles. But there was more than food, music, and dance going on at
the Venice Canal Festivals.
The annual events were started as a
strategy by a small group of Venice activists to undermine a Master Plan created
by the City of Los Angeles that would have turned the Canals into a gated,
limited access community for a wealthy few. The festival organizers’
tactic for stopping the Plan was for the people of Los Angeles to come witness
for themselves what a vibrant community was already
here.
But by the late sixties, whether
Venice had become, as one writer of the time dubbed it, a unique “urban
fantasy” or merely an eyesore was a matter of personal perspective.
After Los Angeles annexed Venice in
1925 following Abbot Kinney’s death, the city exploited its resources,
opening up the land to oil companies. The beach was unusable for years because
of oil sewage. The canals suffered through devastating floods during the 1930s.
When the oil dried up in the 1950s, the City was left with what it saw as an
undesirable backwater inhabited by a motley assortment of low-income multiethnic
families living in rundown, sub-standard housing on unsafe waterways.
The City began to realize there was
untapped potential here for water recreation – resources that were then
being developed in Marina del Rey - and set about making plans for what they
considered improvements - thereby also creating a more profitable tax
basis.
But Canal residents had a
different perspective. Although short of material possessions, they were rich
with a sense of community that generated from inter-dependence among the
residents who often had to rely on each other just to get
by.
In a struggle that went on for a
decade, residents offered their own plans for improving living conditions at a
minimal cost to the City. At the same time, owners, including a number of Latino
families living in the area, were facing the possibility of huge assessments if
a City renewal plan went through. Many sold when offered more money than they
ever thought their properties could bring - sales prices of $25,000 and more.
Having purchased on speculation that property values would rise if a City-backed
plan were enacted, many of the new owners were absentee landlords with only
financial and no personal ties to the
community.
Finally, in 1969 the long
awaited plan was announced.
“A
City engineer named Orsini came to a PTA meeting at the local school and
unveiled to us the wonderful thing that was going to come to our
neighborhood,” recalls Noel Osheroff, a resident of 28th Avenue since the
mid-60s. “He had his easel and one of those flip-over things, and he was
terribly proud.” The engineer laid out what had been drawn up downtown for
solving the problem of what to do with the Canals of Venice.
The Master Plan called for rows of
houses butted up against one another with shared walls built along each Canal.
Sidewalks and footbridges would be taken out. Gates with guards would be
positioned along Grand Canal allowing owners access to each canal. A bridge tall
enough to allow boats with masts to go under would be built at Washington for
passage out to the Marina.
“There was a protest in the room,” says Noel. “Finally he just
folded his stuff up and said, ‘Well, sorry you don’t like it, but
this is progress, and you can’t stop it.’ And he
left.”
The City planned to pay
for the project by assessing each Canal property owner several thousand dollars.
Since this would still not produce enough revenue, they planned a smaller
assessment for owners on 28th Street, where Noel and her now ex-husband Abe
Osheroff lived. “The neighbors on the street were hysterical about it
because they were all just hanging on,” Noel
recalls.
Abe met with a lawyer to find
out what could be done. Neighbors got together every week. It was at one of
these meetings that Abe presented an idea: “Let’s have a Canal
Festival that will demonstrate to the City that this should not be made into a
private enclave. It’s a resource that belongs to the whole
city.”
The widely shared
dissatisfaction in the community soon coalesced into a plan by a small group of
activists headed up by Abe Osheroff, who envisioned turning some of the more
than 20 lots owned by the City into public parks; the Canals would be fixed up,
and the crumbling sidewalks
repaired.
“It was really kind of
appalling to see him go into action,” Noel recalls about the former
husband. Abe Osheroff was no newcomer to activism. “He was an old politico
before I ever met him,” said Noel. “In New York he’d been a
big hotshot in the Communist Party. In Brooklyn, he was used to getting up on
soapboxes and talking to crowds and knowing how to go down to city hall and
really was good at it. He had dropped out of the Communist Party along with a
lot of people and turned away from any political life, but this sort of
re-invigorated him. Just like an old circus horse, he heard the music and
started prancing!”
“It was
the lowest rent on the west side of Los Angeles,” recalls Mandy Peck, who
moved to the Canals in 1968. “So a lot of people gravitated to this area
because of that. It was considered a slum back then, so other people were
hesitant to come into the Canals. But people who were hip knew that it was
paradise.”
The first Canal
Festival was promoted by word of mouth and hand written signs put up on phone
poles and at local businesses. Posters with photography by resident John Heller
and design and printing by Noel Osheroff advertised subsequent festivals and
were distributed widely.
“It was
an instant hit,” says Noel of the first Venice Canal Festival held in
September 1969.
“We got a permit
to close off 28th Avenue, and people of the community served hot dogs, juices
and cookies and everybody kind of joined in,” recalls Venice artist Emily
Winters, who was then a Canal resident. “There were many bands and face
painting for
children.”
Camaraderie was
widespread. “People would just gather in the yards, and everybody was
sharing. They would open up their yards and bathrooms,” Emily
recalls.
“People put their
kitchen tables out in the front yard, cut up watermelons and cooked corn on the
cob – did all kinds of little set-ups of food,” says Mandy.
“And maybe if they were an artist, they would put out the kind of artwork
they did – either ceramics or painting or making
clothes.”
The Festivals offered a
variety of musical experiences, according to Mandy: “My next-door neighbor
was a piano player. He set up his piano, drums, and an upright base and had a
group playing in his front yard. At John Heller’s house, he and a woman
who was a vocalist were singing classical music. You walked from one house to
another and experienced a whole different
thing.”
The Festival was also
successful in bringing media attention to the Canals. Abe Osheroff and his
allies continued to find ways of getting coverage of what was happening here,
casting the City in the role of villain with their Master Plan that threatened a
way of life for hundreds of low-income residents, including many families,
artists, and elderly people.
Many
months after a second Canal Festival the following year, public hearings were
scheduled at City Hall in June 1971 before the City Council was to vote on the
Master Plan. The Canal community showed up en masse to argue that because the
Canals themselves were public property they could not be
privatized.
“It gave me my
political education,” says Emily Winters. “I really saw how
everything works, and it was quite remarkable. We carpooled. The church on
Mildred supplied us with a bus, and we took the elderly down, who said,
‘If you do this, I can’t pay thousands of
dollars.’”
“They said
you had to be a property owner to talk,” says Emily, who was among the
overwhelming majority of the protesters who were renters. “I said, No,
I’m a renter, and they say, No, you can’t talk, and they’d
shut off the microphone.”
One
renter started yelling, “This is like Nazi Germany,” and was carried
out of the room into the hall where the large overflow of protesters. “So
it was a typical Venice kind of thing,” says
Emily.
In spite of the protest, the
City Council of Los Angeles voted in favor of the renewal plan 13 to1. So why
are the Canals not a gated, private community
today?
“There had been so much
publicity about this whole thing. That was something Abe is a genius at is
getting publicity,” says his form wife Noel. “By the time they put
it out to bid, no one would bid on it.” So the controversy created by the
protesters finally brought about the demise of the Master
Plan.
The Canal Festivals grew much
larger in subsequent years. Thousands of people from across the city could be
seen walking through the Canals at Venice’s annual open party. With
success came increasing problems.
“The commercial aspect was the
undoing of the festival,” says Mandy Peck. “The City came to the
community and said, If you’re selling food, you can’t do it without
a permit. It was getting out of control.” The fire department complained
because all the entryways were blocked making it impossible to respond in case
of an emergency.
Even from the
beginning, there was violence amid the revelry. “There was a lot of
drinking and doping and celebrating going on,” recalls Noel Osheroff.
‘There was a real ugly fight that broke out at the end of the street with
a guy getting pretty badly cut by a broken bottle. And it cast a pall over
it.”
“That’s when
the Metro Squad was going around beating up people,” Emily recalls. The
police department, which already had a reputation for dealing with the antics of
the hippie lifestyle Venice community with heavy-handed tactics, came down
especially hard during the
festivals.
“When it was small,
everybody would make food and share,” Emily continues. “But then you
got all these strange people around. It would end at dark and all these drunks
and druggies would be hanging out snarling at each
other.”
“It was getting out
of control, and so instead of looking forward to it, we’re going, Oh, no.
What are we going to do?” Mandy recalls. “We realized we had created
a monster.”
Long-time Canal
resident Mary Lou Johnson, who died in 2000, came up with the idea of having a
Canal Festival Funeral.
“A young
man named Mark built this huge paper mache duck with a tear. So we got the old
barge, and we had singers and players and this big duck that went around the
Canals,” says Emily.
Residents of
the Canals dressed in costumes and joined in a parade that ended in one of the
vacant lots where the funeral ceremony took
place.
“We had a coffin,”
Mandy recalls. A guy here named Happy Jack who was a biker presided over the
funeral. Jack used to carry a staff with a skull on the top of it and ribbons
hanging down. We had a band and belly dancers. People were dressed in black and
flowing dresses, and it was
wild.”
And so, after seven annual
events, the community said goodbye to the Canal Festivals in a style apropos of
Venice during the ‘60s and early ‘70s.
The Canal Festival Funeral also marked
the end of an era for the community. The Master Plan had died from too much bad
publicity, but the wheels had been set in motion for the development of the
Bohemian backwater. The Canals days of being a low-rent paradise were
numbered.
This article is re-printed
with permission from VOCAL, the quarterly newsletter of Voice of the Canals
(VOC) community organization, which is open to all residents of the Venice
Canals as well as supporters living outside. Contact: www.voiceofthecanals.com
or VOCnewsletter@aol.com
Posted: Wed - September 1, 2004 at 03:35 PM