Windward Avenue, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Windward Avenue in Los Angeles, California.

Windward Avenue is a theatrical corridor where Venice's bohemian beachfront character meets Abbot Kinney's Mediterranean-inspired resort architecture, arcaded commercial blocks and a ceremonial route conceived as the principal gateway to Venice of America.

Running through Venice between Venice Beach and Oakwood, the neighborhood corridor follows a compact line from Ocean Front Walk toward Windward Circle, crossing Pacific Avenue before terminating at the former center of Kinney's original resort plan. Low-rise commercial buildings press directly against the sidewalks, with surviving colonnades carrying upper floors above deeply shaded pedestrian passages and sculpted capitals punctuating the arcade. Traveling east from the Pacific compresses the transition from beach frontage into a tightly framed commercial street before the roadway opens dramatically at the circular junction of Main Street, Grand Boulevard and Windward Avenue. Mediterranean Revival façades, painted brick, murals and the suspended VENICE letters give the short route an architectural concentration disproportionate to its length. The result is a corridor whose arcades, compressed commercial scale, ceremonial orientation and direct connection between the Pacific and Windward Circle preserve the spatial core of the seaside community Kinney began constructing more than a century ago.

What you should know about Windward Avenue.

Windward Avenue is best known for serving as the principal commercial street of Abbot Kinney's Venice of America, a resort conceived after Kinney and Francis G. Ryan purchased a 275-acre beachfront parcel in 1891 and began developing Ocean Park along its northern portion. Ryan died in 1898, and disagreements between Kinney and subsequent partners ended their association in 1904, leaving Kinney with the undeveloped southern acreage after the partners divided their holdings. Kinney moved rapidly to create an independent seaside development inspired by Venice, Italy, commissioning Norman Foote Marsh and Clarence H. Russell to shape its principal architecture around Mediterranean and Italian Renaissance precedents. Construction along Windward began in 1904, with Kinney requiring business-district exteriors to maintain a coordinated Venetian Renaissance character. Concrete foundations were prepared for 82 cast-iron columns supporting the planned arcades, and the iron components arrived from the East in February 1905 as builders pushed toward the resort's opening. The arcades adopted enclosed colonnaded walkways inspired by Piazza San Marco, extending commercial architecture over the sidewalks and giving the street a continuous sheltered passage. The Bank of Venice stood at Windward and Pacific avenues by 1905, and the St. Mark's Hotel rose near the ocean end after construction began in December 1904. Pacific Electric service and Kinney's miniature railroad converged near Windward and Pacific, making the intersection a transportation gateway for visitors arriving from Los Angeles and Santa Monica. Windward Avenue then carried those arrivals west toward Kinney's oceanfront amusement district, where the pier, auditorium and Ship Cafe extended the commercial axis into the Pacific. Venice of America opened on July 4, 1905, placing Windward at the center of a resort whose architecture, transportation and entertainment infrastructure were deliberately organized around the street.

Successive losses during the twentieth century reduced Kinney's original architectural composition without erasing Windward Avenue's role as Venice's symbolic center. Los Angeles annexed Venice in 1926 after Kinney's death, and the former independent city entered decades marked by pier fires, the filling of many original waterways and demolition across its aging resort district. The St. Mark's Hotel, among Windward's principal 1905 buildings, survived until 1964 before demolition removed a major component of the original oceanfront gateway. Surviving arcaded buildings retained the sculpted columns and Mediterranean Revival forms that had distinguished the commercial district from its opening years, leaving the blocks around Pacific Avenue as the strongest architectural remnant of Kinney's commercial plan. Architect Steven Ehrlich addressed the vanished eastern terminus between 1986 and 1989 through three buildings around Windward Circle, the former location of the Grand Lagoon, using contemporary forms tied to the scale and energy of the earlier resort. The Windward Circle Trio received a California AIA Award of Merit in 1990, giving the former lagoon site a significant late twentieth-century architectural chapter. Another restoration arrived above Pacific Avenue in 2007 when the Venice Sign Restoration Project installed a 63-foot reproduction of the illuminated VENICE sign that had once greeted arrivals along Windward. The 33-inch aluminum letters returned the street's historic gateway marker to its original axis, reconnecting surviving arcades, contemporary architecture and the beachfront through a visual element first associated with Kinney's resort.

How to fold Windward Avenue into your trip.

Windward Avenue works as the anchor for a Venice sequence tracing the neighborhood's creative culture from experimental literature through Chicano muralism into the skateboarding tradition that carried its beachfront influence around the world.

Begin at Beyond Baroque, founded by poet and editor George Drury Smith in 1968 as an experimental literary magazine before its storefront developed into a gathering place for readings, workshops, publishing and artistic exchange. Joseph Hansen and John Harris brought an existing poetry workshop there in 1969, creating the Wednesday Night Poetry Workshop that continued across subsequent generations of Los Angeles writers. Beyond Baroque became a nonprofit organization in 1972, received its first National Endowment for the Arts grant the following year and expanded its publishing work during the decade. Exene Cervenka met John Doe through the poetry workshop before the pair co-founded X, connecting the literary center directly with Los Angeles punk. The organization moved in 1979 into Venice's former 1906 City Hall, where writers including Wanda Coleman, Amy Gerstler and Dennis Cooper became associated with later chapters of its literary culture. Continue to Social and Public Art Resource Center, founded in 1976 by Judith F. Baca, filmmaker Donna Deitch and artist Christina Schlesinger during the expansion of Chicano muralism across Los Angeles. Baca's Great Wall of Los Angeles became SPARC's first major project, beginning with 1,000 feet painted in the Tujunga Wash during summer 1976 by 80 youths working with ten artists and five historians. Further campaigns in 1978, 1980, 1981 and 1983 extended the mural as hundreds of young participants helped construct a visual history centered on communities excluded from conventional historical representation. SPARC moved into the former Venice Police Station in 1977, converting the 1929 Art Deco jail into its headquarters. Its work later expanded through the Neighborhood Pride program, which produced 105 community artworks with 95 commissioned artists and more than 1,800 youth apprentices, and through the UCLA@SPARC Digital/Mural Lab established there in 1996. Conclude at Venice Beach Skatepark, the 16,000-square-foot concrete facility that gave a permanent beachfront setting to a skating culture with deep roots in Venice and neighboring Dogtown. Local skaters led by Jesse Martinez spent years pursuing the project after the redevelopment of the beachfront removed earlier informal skating terrain. Designer Zach Wormhoudt worked with Martinez, Pat Ngoho, Christian Hosoi and other Venice riders as the plan developed around bowls, a snake run and street terrain recalling both pool skating and the neighborhood's street tradition. Construction began in 2009, and the park opened on October 3 with Martinez, Tony Hawk, Jay Adams and civic leaders participating in the inaugural gathering. Its deepest bowl descends nine feet into the sand, placing advanced transition skating directly beside the Pacific. The progression moves from Beyond Baroque's experimental literary community through Baca and SPARC's expansion of participatory mural art and culminates in Venice Beach Skatepark's permanent home for a local skating culture that reshaped an international sport.

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