Venice Beach Boardwalk

This guide to the Venice Beach Boardwalk in Los Angeles opens with a coin flip in 1891, when developer Abbot Kinney inherited the swampy half of a coastal marsh nobody wanted and turned it into Venice of America, a fantasy Mediterranean resort with canals, gondolas, and a boardwalk pier. It follows the resort's decline into what locals once called the Slum by the Sea, and the artists, bohemians, and Holocaust survivors who moved in once rent got cheap. By the drought years of the 1970s, backyard pools nearby sat empty, drawing a crew of local surfers looking for something new to ride.