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The Venice of America was founded by Abbot Kinney in 1905, and it was annexed to Los Angeles in 1925. (There have been several
movements to secede from Los Angeles since then, including currently.) In 1929 most of the canals were filled in to allow for
automobile traffic. In the 1930s oil drilling supplanted amusement. Hundreds of wells covered the area and drilling waste
clogged the remaining waterways. It was a short-lived boom, but the wells were still producing oil into the 1970s.
Venice is remarkable for a number of innovations. Movie aviator and Venice airport owner, B.H. DeLay, implemented the first
lighted airport in the United States on DeLay Field (previously known as Ince Field). He also initiated the first aerial police
in the nation, after a marine rescue attempt was thwarted. DeLay also performed many of the world's first aerial stunts for
motion pictures in Venice.
Venice and neighboring Santa Monica were host for a decade to an amusement and pleasure-pier called Pacific Ocean Park, or
POP by locals. The facility experienced declining attendance in the mid-60s due to increasing competition from other newer
parks in Southern California such as Disneyland, Knott's Berry Farm, Busch Gardens, and Marineland, and it was torn down to
make way for a large residential building complex. Another aging tear-down in the 1960s was the Aragon Ballroom that had been
the longtime home of The Lawrence Welk Show. The district around POP is known as Dogtown, which was home to pioneering
skateboarders the Z-Boys, as profiled in the documentary film, Dogtown and Z-Boys.
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