Why Townhouse matters.
Townhouse Venice is a historic cocktail bar where Venice's bohemian character meets a 1915 drinking room, an authentic Prohibition-era basement and more than a century of nightlife on Windward Avenue.
Set along Windward Avenue near Pacific Avenue and just steps from Venice Beach Recreation Center, the bar occupies the historic heart of Venice between Abbot Kinney's surviving arcaded commercial blocks, Ocean Front Walk and the Pacific shoreline, where the short avenue still carries the architectural imprint of the seaside resort opened in 1905. Original Menotti's Buffet tile survives near the entrance, placing the building's earliest name directly beneath the contemporary bar. The ground floor centers drinking around a long wooden counter, booths and pool before a staircase descends into the former illicit basement. Del Monte Speakeasy shifts the setting underground through perimeter booths, early California murals, a stage and a second bar used for live bands, DJs and comedy. The result is a rare Venice drinking establishment where the physical remnants of Prohibition remain embedded inside an active nightlife venue.
What defines Townhouse.
Townhouse Venice is best known for preserving the bar Italian immigrant Cesar Menotti opened as Menotti's Buffet in 1915 and the clandestine basement operation that followed after Prohibition began in 1920. Menotti converted the street level into a grocery store and moved alcohol service below, where entry originally required descending through a trapdoor in a two-person rope-operated dumbwaiter. Liquor ships waited beyond the three-mile coastal limit, smaller boats carried their cargo beneath the nearby pier and Venice's maintenance tunnels provided a concealed route into Menotti's basement. The operation supplied whiskey and rum during the thirteen years of Prohibition before repeal in 1933 returned the principal bar to the ground floor and left the basement to develop as Club Del Monte. Frank and Annie Bennett introduced a staircase to the basement in 1968, replacing the original trapdoor access with the physical connection still central to the building. Louie and Netty Ryan assumed control in June 2007 and restored the lower room after decades of ownership changes, reopening the Del Monte as a performance venue connected directly with the surviving 1915 bar above.
Original landscape murals painted across the basement walls place romanticized scenes of early Southern California and Venice beside a room once concealed from the street above. Live performance subsequently became central to the Del Monte, carrying the underground room beyond its bootlegging history through musicians including Feist, Raphael Saadiq, Ben Harper, Haim, Tom Freund and jazz pianist Austin Peralta. The contemporary stage continues with bands, DJs and comedy, preserving performance as the basement's principal function after its post-Prohibition conversion. Upstairs, the cocktail program draws from successive periods of American drinking culture, moving through pre-Prohibition classics, postwar drinks and contemporary craft cocktails. The two floors divide the venue into complementary forms: a street-level neighborhood bar built around cocktails, conversation and pool, and an underground room where music and performance occupy the same basement that once concealed illegal alcohol.
How Townhouse fits.
Townhouse Venice works as the anchor for an outing connecting the surviving architecture of Abbot Kinney's seaside resort with the literary counterculture that later remade Venice and the beachfront athletic culture that became another internationally recognized chapter of the neighborhood.
Begin at Venice Heritage Museum, where the neighborhood's surviving material culture is interpreted through a collection rooted in historian Elayne Alexander's archive of photographs, artifacts, oral histories and writing. Alexander spent eighteen years with the Venice Historical Society, authored six books on local history and assembled a body of material that became the foundation of the museum's permanent collection. The institution occupies a reconstructed Pacific Electric Railway depot, connecting its historical work with the electric railway that once carried enormous crowds into Kinney's seaside resort. Continue to Former Site of Venice West Café, the 1922 brick building where poet Stuart Perkoff opened his Beat coffeehouse in 1958. Perkoff had moved to Venice in 1952 and became one of the neighborhood's prominent street poets before creating a room for poetry, jazz and the community surrounding Venice West. Lawrence Lipton's 1959 book The Holy Barbarians carried that scene to a national audience, and photographer Charles Brittin preserved many of its participants in images. John Haag assumed the cafe in 1962 and kept it operating until 1966; Los Angeles designated the surviving building Historic-Cultural Monument No. 979 in 2010. Conclude at Muscle Beach Venice, where outdoor weight training has occupied the Venice oceanfront since 1959. The facility became a center of Southern California bodybuilding as Venice absorbed athletes and gym culture associated with the postwar physical-culture movement. Los Angeles subsequently established the Muscle Beach Venice Bodybuilding Hall of Fame around the weight pen, with competitions traditionally staged on Memorial Day, Independence Day and Labor Day. The progression moves from the preservation of Venice's resort-era material culture through a brick coffeehouse associated with its Beat writers and culminates on the oceanfront where public bodybuilding became another enduring expression of the neighborhood's unconventional cultural history.
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