C O V E R
S T O R Y COURTESY OF VENICE HERITAGE MUSEUM & THE STUDIO FOR ENVIRONMENTAL ARCHITECTURE
Capturing Venice’s Heritage Foundation raising money to open museum in Red Car trolley By Bridgette M. Redman Takara Tomeoni Adair knew what she’d do if she ever won the lottery. She would use the money to build a museum in her hometown of Venice. Then a Google search informed her that she wouldn’t have to wait for lightning to strike because others shared her dream and were in the process of making it happen. “I have to know these people,” said Adair, who is now on the Venice Heritage Museum Foundation board. “I have to be involved. I can’t believe these people are here and they’re doing this work. It was brilliant. It was beautiful.” In mid-April, the Foundation launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise money for what many people are surprised doesn’t already exist. The museum, which will be built in Centennial Park to have a campus-like atmosphere that will be a gathering place for the community, will house stories, artifacts, archives and art collections that celebrate Venice’s 100-plus years of history. For a small town, Venice has a rich history that has changed the world. It is the birthplace of The Doors, and the architecture of Frank Gehry. It is home to Muscle Beach, to the Light and Space art movement, to Dogtown and Z-Boys skateboarders. Ray Bradbury has connections to Venice and is an honorary board member of the Venice Heritage Museum. Kristina von Hoffmann is a second-generation board
member who is now the secretary of the board, and her father was the founding president. “He likes to say I’ve succeeded him and improved on his contributions; I look at it as a generational passing of the torch,” said von Hoffmann. Von Hoffmann explained that the board has four different generations serving on it from the Silent Generation and boomers to Gen Xers and millennials. She said they will be centering stories of the diverse populations of Venice starting with the Tongva First Peoples. They have enlisted the help of a Tongva elder to collect artifacts and create an exhibit devoted to Venice’s First Peoples. They also plan to highlight the historic black neighborhoods of generations that came from the Deep South for a better life on the West Coast. “No other city next to the beach in Los Angeles is as diverse as Venice,” von Hoffmann said, further listing Mexicans, Central Americans, Latin Americans, Japanese Americans and Korean Americans. “We have so many stories of resilience and so many cultural movements…That’s why we need a museum — to capture all these stories of our cultural identities and people’s creative identities.”
Plans start with renovating a trolley The fundraising push is coming now because the Orange Empire Railway
PAGE 14 THE ARGONAUT MAY 13, 2021
The Venice Heritage Museum Foundation is raising funds to build the city’s first-ever museum to preserve, showcase and celebrate Venice’s historical legacy. Museum has donated one of the original Pacific Electric Red Car trolleys that ran from downtown LA to Venice Beach — known as the Venice Short Line. The project architect, David Hertz and the Studio of Environmental Architecture, let them know about a local historic bungalow that was going to be demolished. He donated the nostalgic building to the Venice Heritage Museum. It will be transformed into a replica of the Tokio Ticket Station. “These two historic structures are living history themselves,”
von Hoffmann said. “And will provide us space for our exhibitions and to some extent, our archives.” They’ve received conditional approval from the City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks to build the Venice Heritage Museum in Centennial Park at Abbot Kinney and Venice Boulevard. They have volunteers, plans and resources lined up.
Fundraising takes on an urgency to win approval
However, to get a lease to Centennial Park, they must first present proof of enough money
to complete and operate Phase I of their business plan. Phase I includes the restoration of the trolley car, which will be the primary structure of the museum and the cost of transporting it to the museum campus site. The original plan was to launch a fundraising campaign on the 115th birthday of Venice’s founder, Abbot Kinney. But 2020 happened and those plans had to be delayed. Phase 1 funding will require $115,000 and covers the following expenses: • Moving the trolley from the Orange Empire Railway
