Abbot Kinney Boulevard, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Los Angeles, California.

Abbot Kinney Boulevard is a storied corridor where Venice's bohemian character meets early resort-town development, surviving Craftsman architecture and a commercial street recast around art, design and independent enterprise.

Running through Venice between the Oakwood district and the surviving canal neighborhood, the neighborhood corridor follows a diagonal line from Main Street toward Washington Boulevard, crossing Westminster Avenue, Venice Boulevard and several short residential streets before turning south toward the Marina Peninsula. Small parcels give the central blocks an unusually intimate scale, with converted cottages standing beside one- to three-story brick and stucco commercial buildings dating across several periods of Venice development. Traveling southeast reveals the street's diagonal relationship with the surrounding grid, a geometry inherited from an alignment that once paralleled the Pacific Electric Inglewood Line immediately to its north. Low building heights preserve broad stretches of open sky, and intermittent residential structures interrupt commercial frontage with porches, gardens and setbacks left from the boulevard's earliest building phase. The result is a corridor whose diagonal alignment, compact parcels, surviving cottages and low commercial buildings retain the physical imprint of Venice's transition from seaside subdivision to dense neighborhood business district.

What you should know about Abbot Kinney Boulevard.

Abbot Kinney Boulevard is best known for evolving from a residential street on the edge of Venice of America into the general-purpose business district that the independent city previously lacked, followed decades later by a 1990 renaming that attached the founder's name directly to the corridor. The road first carried the name Camino Real, then Lake Avenue, and later West Washington Boulevard as development spread across Kinney's coastal subdivision. Its diagonal course paralleled the Pacific Electric Inglewood Line, with the original Venice canals to the south and Oakwood developing north of the tracks. Early construction consisted largely of Craftsman cottages, including surviving houses from 1910 and 1911, before commercial construction accelerated during the early 1920s. The 1923 Bundy Building became a prominent example of the modest brick commercial architecture accompanying that change, and by Venice's 1925 consolidation with Los Angeles the street had assumed a central business role within the former municipality. Los Angeles City Planning recognizes a 147-parcel commercial planning district between Westminster Avenue and Venice Boulevard where cottages from the teens and 1920s remain interspersed with low brick commercial buildings from the 1920s.

The corridor also occupied a consequential social boundary between the predominantly white Venice of America development to its south and Oakwood, where discriminatory housing practices concentrated Black residents north of the railroad tracks. Washington Boulevard developed into a racial, ethnic and socioeconomic mixing ground with Black-owned businesses serving the adjoining community, even as segregation restricted residential movement across the district. Abbot Kinney's chauffeur Irving Tabor inherited Kinney's house after his employer died in 1920, yet racial restrictions prevented Tabor from occupying it at its original canal location; he moved the building into Oakwood. By the 1970s, the commercial strip included Black-owned businesses, a youth center, artist studios, secondhand shops and literary activity before wealthier businesses increasingly entered during the late 1970s and 1980s. Merchant Carol Tantau Smith helped lead the campaign to eliminate confusion created by several nearby Washington-named roads, and the former West Washington Boulevard officially became Abbot Kinney Boulevard in August 1990. The name change accompanied a concerted commercial reinvestment campaign and preceded the street's subsequent emergence as one of Venice's most valuable retail addresses.

How to fold Abbot Kinney Boulevard into your trip.

Abbot Kinney Boulevard works as the anchor for an outing connecting a surviving piece of Venice's original waterborne plan, a house converted into an immense work of ceramic art and a literary institution descended from the neighborhood's late-1960s counterculture.

Begin at Venice Canal Historic District, the surviving remnant of the waterway system at the center of Kinney's Venice in America project. The resort opened July 4, 1905 after marshland behind the coastal dunes was excavated into canals, with arched pedestrian bridges connecting residential islands and Pacific Electric lines carrying crowds from metropolitan Los Angeles. Later investors created the New Amsterdam Canals to the south, including Sherman and Howland canals, which survive within the present six-canal district. Most of Kinney's original northern waterways were drained and paved during the automobile era, leaving the southern system as the principal surviving physical inheritance of the canal city. The remaining waterways extend for about one and a half miles, and Los Angeles undertook a major restoration between 1991 and 1993 that deepened the channels, rebuilt retaining walls and reconstructed pedestrian infrastructure. Continue to Mosaic Tile House, a 1947 bungalow that artists Cheri Pann and Gonzalo Duran began remaking after Pann purchased the property in 1994. Pann initially wanted backyard space for a large painting studio and took a construction course at Santa Monica College before helping build two studios with Duran and fellow students. Bathroom tiles became the starting point for a much larger undertaking: Pann produced glazed and hand-formed ceramic pieces, Duran constructed sculptural forms and the pair gradually covered walls, ceilings, floors, furniture, passageways and outdoor structures with broken ceramics, glass and found objects. Los Angeles City Planning later recognized the property as a rare Venice example of folk art created by trained painters and ceramic artists. Pann died in May 2025 at age 85, leaving the house as the product of more than three decades of collaborative work. Conclude at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, which George Drury Smith founded in 1968 as an experimental literary magazine from a storefront on West Washington Boulevard, the future Abbot Kinney Boulevard. Public Thursday-night events followed, and poets Joseph Hansen and John Harris brought their poetry workshop to the storefront in 1969, beginning the Wednesday Night Poetry Workshop that became central to the institution. Beyond Baroque incorporated as a nonprofit in 1972, received its first National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1973 and expanded its original storefront with a library and performance room in 1975. Exene Cervenka worked there and met John Doe through the poetry workshop before the pair co-founded X. Growth prompted Beyond Baroque to move in 1979 into Venice's former 1906 City Hall, where writers and artists including Wanda Coleman, Dennis Cooper, Amy Gerstler, Bob Flanagan and Mike Kelley later participated in its literary culture. The progression moves from Kinney's surviving waterborne city through Pann and Duran's decades-long conversion of a modest bungalow into ceramic art and culminates in a literary organization born on the boulevard itself, connecting three successive forms of Venice creative production across more than a century.

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