Marina Del Rey

The Past as Prologue

Marina del Rey, like much of the City of Angels, has a rich and colorful history - it’s just not all that old. The harbor at the heart of the community of Marina del Rey is a splendid example of a successful Army Corps of Engineers project; funded and planned cooperatively by the Federal government, Los Angeles County and private developers, it is the largest man-made marina in the United States, with over 5,300 small-boat slips.

Blessed with a temperate climate and stunning beaches, Marina del Rey, an unincorporated district of Los Angeles County with a population just over 8,000, began as a dream that, to paraphrase Marcel Proust, became an address.

The Shoshone and Gabrieleno/Tongva Indians were the region’s first residents, living along the bluffs above the ocean, the neighborhood’s first fishermen and hunters, but by no means the last. Eventually they shared the land and sea, the good duck hunting and steel-head trout fishing, with the Spanish and eventually the first Angelenos.

The dream that eventually became modern Marina del Rey began in 1887 when a developer named M.C. Wicks, ironically working under the auspices of a railroad, the Santa Fe, sought to create a commercial harbor for the city of Los Angeles from the estuary and inlets of the village of Playa del Rey. Three years, one wharf-destroying storm and $300,000 later, Wicks’ Port Ballona Development Company – the name probably derived from “la ballena,” Spanish for whale - was bankrupt and the ducks and hunters resumed their seasonal pas de deux.

The Carnival Next Door

Not long after Wicks’ fall, immediately north of Playa a visionary named Abbot Kinney had his own dream: the creation of a cultural and recreational haven on the ocean, complete with an extensive system of canals and bridges modeled on a certain sea-surrounded Italian paradise in the blue Adriatic. Kinney magnificently pulled off his ambitious artistic vision and Venice-by-the Sea, later shortened to Venice - present-day Marina del Rey’s boisterous, never-boring, neighbor to the immediate north - came to life. Venice blossomed into the Coney Island-amusement-park-of-the-west for some thirty years, faded in mid-20th century, then rebounded into brilliant, bohemian life in the 1960s which continues on today to its own lively drumbeat.

Today, world-famous Venice Beach is home to painters and poets, muscle builders and performance artists, street vendors and eccentrics of every conceivable stripe – think New York’s Greenwich Village with good weather and tans. A modest portion of Kinney’s grand scheme of canals and bridges charmingly remains to this day, just north of the foot of Washington Boulevard.