Lincoln Boulevard, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Lincoln Boulevard in Los Angeles, California.

Lincoln Boulevard is a storied corridor where Venice's independent character meets presidential commemoration, coastal highway engineering and the automobile-era expansion that shifted Los Angeles's western edge inland from the Pacific.

Running through Venice between Marina Del Rey and Santa Monica, the northbound corridor follows the coastal plain from the Ballona Creek crossing through the broad commercial spine east of the beach before entering Santa Monica and continuing toward the foot of the city's northern residential districts. South of Venice Boulevard, long retail parcels, workshops and low industrial buildings occupy level ground where the boulevard forms a pronounced inland edge to Venice and approaches the Ballona watershed. Through the neighborhood's central blocks, closely spaced storefronts, freestanding commercial buildings and occasional residential properties create a dense roadside landscape whose broad pavement contrasts sharply with the narrow walk streets and compact residential parcels extending westward. Approaching Santa Monica, the corridor maintains its substantial width as older commercial structures alternate with apartments and newer development, preserving the linear scale created when automobile traffic became the dominant force along the western Los Angeles coast. The result is a corridor whose broad roadway, changing commercial grain and long relationship with the coastal plain reveal the inland transportation spine that succeeded Venice's earlier rail-centered geography.

What you should know about Lincoln Boulevard.

Lincoln Boulevard is best known for becoming the inland coastal highway through Venice after beginning as a local road whose presidential name preceded the rise of automobile transportation. Santa Monica had an 8th Street extending south toward the Venice boundary during the late nineteenth century, and the roadway appears on maps by 1894. Venice continued the route as Compton Road after the resort city emerged during the opening years of the twentieth century. Pleasant “Plez” James, a former Venice city clerk, petitioned in November 1913 to replace the Compton Road name with Lincoln Boulevard. James argued that Washington Boulevard, then the principal roadway between Los Angeles and Venice, deserved a presidential counterpart, linking the new street name directly with the established east-west route. The resulting Lincoln alignment became increasingly important as automobiles challenged the electric railway system that had carried enormous crowds to Venice since the resort's founding. State highway construction during the 1930s elevated that local street into a component of a much larger coastal transportation system. The 400-foot Santa Monica tunnel opened on February 1, 1936, connecting Lincoln Boulevard with the Roosevelt Highway along the ocean and completing a major link in the state's coastal improvement program around Santa Monica. Farther south, a reinforced-concrete bridge completed across Ballona Creek in 1937 carried what was then identified as the Roosevelt Highway across a waterway that had repeatedly flooded the surrounding lowlands. State highway renumbering in 1964 placed the Lincoln segment within California State Route 1, joining the boulevard to a coastal highway extending hundreds of miles through the state. Lincoln consequently evolved from a locally renamed continuation of Santa Monica's street grid into the principal State Route 1 alignment through Venice, Playa Vista and Westchester.

The land flanking the southern corridor entered an entirely different period of consequence through aviation, wartime industry and the transformation of the Ballona lowlands. Japanese immigrant farmers leased extensive acreage across the flat ground during the 1920s and 1930s, cultivating vegetables on holdings extending from north of Jefferson Boulevard toward the Westchester bluffs. Their farms occupied territory where seasonal water, Centinela Creek and the broader Ballona drainage had long constrained intensive urban construction. Federal removal of West Coast residents of Japanese ancestry in 1942 abruptly ended that agricultural presence, following a period when families working the western basin had already become important suppliers to regional produce markets. Howard Hughes had begun acquiring nearby acreage at the end of the 1930s after Hughes Aircraft outgrew leased facilities at Grand Central Air Terminal in Glendale. His original 380-acre tract was bounded on the west by Lincoln Boulevard, then identified there as Roosevelt Highway, and on the north by Jefferson Boulevard. Architect Henry L. Gogerty planned the new industrial campus, where construction began in December 1940 and Hughes Aircraft personnel moved into the first completed building during the July 1941 holiday weekend. The campus expanded to 1,300 acres and incorporated a 9,500-foot private runway, conceived as the longest privately owned airstrip in the world. Hughes used the property for aircraft manufacturing and advanced aeronautical work, making the flat land immediately east of Lincoln one of Southern California's major aviation-industrial concentrations. Hughes Aircraft began withdrawing from the complex decades later, the runway was shortened to 4,000 feet in 1985 and closed the following year as the property moved toward redevelopment. Lincoln Boulevard became the western edge of a landscape that passed within half a century from Japanese-operated truck farms through one of the country's most ambitious private aviation campuses and into a new phase of urban development.

How to fold Lincoln Boulevard into your trip.

Lincoln Boulevard works as the anchor for an outing connecting a pre-earthquake public school, a postwar neighborhood movie house that later became a major revival and concert venue and an independently owned restaurant founded during Venice's countercultural ascent.

Begin at Broadway Elementary School, whose campus at 1015 South Lincoln Boulevard contains a Spanish Colonial Revival school building dating to 1926. The building belongs to the generation of Los Angeles public schools erected before the 1933 Long Beach earthquake forced sweeping changes in school construction across Southern California. Its composition uses an arcade of flattened arches, wood-framed windows, quoined piers and pierced concrete window grilles around a centered entrance, giving the institutional building an architectural presence distinct from the commercial properties lining the boulevard. Later campus construction did not erase the early building's legibility, and its survival gives Lincoln a rare physical connection with Venice education before seismic standards reshaped public-school architecture. Los Angeles preservation work has recognized the property as an unusually intact Venice example from that pre-1933 period. Continue to Fox Venice Theatre, which opened at 620 Lincoln Boulevard on August 17, 1951 as a 1,000-seat Fox West Coast neighborhood cinema. Opening night featured a preview of Meet Me After the Show with Betty Grable, followed by regular exhibition beginning the next day. The theater initially presented mainstream Hollywood films before becoming an important revival house during the 1970s, drawing audiences for classic, foreign, cult and art cinema. Live performance expanded its role later in that decade, and the auditorium developed into a concert destination attracting audiences from across Southern California. The Fox closed as a theater in 1988, ending nearly four decades of exhibition and performance on the boulevard. Conclude at La Cabaña, founded on Lincoln Boulevard in 1963 by Nina L. Haro and Carlos Rafael Haro Lasso. The couple began with a small thatched-roof structure and developed the restaurant during a period when Venice was attracting artists and countercultural communities into inexpensive housing across the neighborhood. Handmade tortillas became an early specialty, with the Haro family placing their culinary traditions at the center of an independently operated restaurant that remained confined to a single Venice location. Decades of continuous operation turned the property into one of the enduring postwar businesses along the boulevard as surrounding roadside commerce repeatedly changed ownership and purpose. The progression moves from a 1926 public school surviving the seismic transformation of Los Angeles educational architecture through a 1951 cinema that evolved into a revival and concert house and culminates in the Haro family's 1963 restaurant, connecting public education, postwar entertainment and multigenerational independent commerce along Lincoln Boulevard.

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