Yesterday, I spent the day with fellow Hollywood historical fiction author Laini Giles, who is in town to promote her new Clara Bow book, “The It Girl and Me” (http://amzn.to/2riuSi3) and I took her down to Venice for some LA realness. By the time we got to the corner of Windward and Pacific, it was all a bit too real for Laini. This photo of that corner was taken in 1914 and unfortunately there is precious little left of the glorious Venetian-inspired architecture we can see in this photo. How wonderful it all must have been to experience Abbot Kinney’s vision while it was still intact.