This photo is a reminder of two things that Venice, California used to have: canals and oil wells. To be fair, there is still a handful of canals left in what is known as the Venice Canal Historic District. But there are certainly no more oil wells blanketing the area as we see in this circa 1930 photo. Without any landmarks other than the bridge, it’s hard to know where this photo was taken, but I do know that when Abbot Kinney envisaged loftily idealized “Venice of America,” he most certainly did not imagine it would be covered with stinky noisy oil wells.
Todd von H. said: “This is Grand Canal running down to the Marina channel. Not one of Kinney’s canals, but part of the Short Line development that went in a year. Kinney’s canals and development became part of LA. His canals were filled in. The later development was not and so survive today. There are several of these large bridges. This may be the one featured in Touch of Evil where Orson Welles’s corrupt cop dies in the trash filled canal.”
John J. “What you’re looking at is the Playa Del Rey Oil Field and the future Marina del Rey. The canal is the main canal that went from Playa Del Rey to Venice. There were no oil wells in Kinney’s Venice of America, other than in the 1930s, when two wells were drilled off of Venice fishing pier. The canals that still exist also had nothing to do with Venice of America. They were built adjacent to the Ocean Strand tract by the Short Line Beach syndicate.”
Thanks, Martin. Yes, Venice was an oil dream, but it came with a price. It’s hard to believe the area was considered “off limits” due to the pollution and oil spills back then. Kinney wanted to make the area like Venice in Europe!
You can’t have both beach and wells. Terrific history lesson about the area, and probably, except for the old timers who live there, not too many folks know the real story about Venice. Amazing.
PS: If it wasn’t for the oil wells (especially during the Depression years of the 30s) and the movie studios, So Cal would have probably wound up a desert! I always tell the tourists over at Warner Brothers this, and they find it fascinating. Burbank a desert town???? Could have been!
Did the oil just run out? I always wondered about that. Thanks for the photo, Martin.
I assume they sucked it all out of the ground and moved on?