On the record
When Los Angeles surveyed Venice block by block for its 2015 historic-resources inventory, this house made the list by address: 1670 South Electric Avenue, built 1914, Craftsman, a contributor to the Milwood Venice Walk Streets Historic District. The finding puts the date beyond argument and places the house in the first great wave of Venice building, when the tracts around Abbot Kinney's canals sold out in days and Craftsman houses went up through the 1910s on lots the surveyors call exceptionally modest, most under a tenth of an acre.
The Kinney years
In 1914 Venice was still an independent city and still Kinney's town; the founder ran it until his death in 1920, and it was annexed to Los Angeles only afterward. Pacific Electric red cars ran along Electric Avenue itself, part of the ring of rail that made a beach resort reachable from downtown, and tracks stayed on the west side of the street until 1928. The avenue has been a quiet residential parallel to Abbot Kinney Boulevard ever since.
The house today
Behind the wrap-around garden the main house holds two bedrooms and two baths, with the original built-ins maintained rather than replaced and a wood-burning fireplace opening the living room to the dining room. A detached guest house brings the total to 1,951 square feet, one block east of the boulevard that now carries the founder's name. In a neighborhood surveyed for what it has kept, this is one of the houses doing the keeping.
