Carolyn Elayne Alexander Images of America: Venice, Arcadia: San Francisco, CA 2004 (1999), 128 pp., 1920
Introduction:
Abbot Kinney [1850-1920], son of Franklin Kinney and Mary Cogswell, attended Columbia University, and then the University of Heidelberg, the Sorbonne, and various Swiss schools, all the while suffering from asthma. He formed the Kinney Brothers Tobacco Company in his mid-twenties with his brother, Francis, using his multi-linguistic skills as foreign buyer. On one such trip he docked in San Francisco (1880) and traveled south to Los Angeles and from there to East Pasadena and the Sierra Madre Villa Hotel, a hotel and sanitarium. Finding it salubrious, he built an estate (1881) nearby which he called Kinneloa, improving many new strains of fruit, especially the blood orange. He failed to win a seat in the State Legislature but did win the hand of Margaret Thornton, [ -1911] daughter of State Supreme Court Justice William Dabney Thornton. Kinneloa didn't suit her in the summer months and they built Mayflower Cottage at Marguerita and Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica. Abbot sold his tobbacco company shares to his brother enabling him to speculate in land and development, including Abbotsford Inn and the Boyle Heights Cable Railway. Kinney, a California men's tennis single's champion, wrote numerous books, founded libraries and chaired a Yosemite Committee. He accompanied Helen Hunt Jackson on her trip to Indian country, which resulted in the book Ramona. In Santa Monica he met Francis Ryan and they formed a land development partnership which purchased Rancho La Ballona. ". . . they built a walk/fishing pier in the Ocean Park section of Santa Monica, developed a commercial street, a family entertainment casino, and a bandstand." Ryan died in 1898. Matilda Ryan married T.H. Dudley six months later. In 1899 the Dudley's sold their share to four men, also with whom Kinney couldn't agree, so they split the Ocean Park property half of which was developed. Kinney chose the undeveloped half . . . " Although the area was called Venice, it was really part of the Ocean Park district of Santa Monica until 1911, when residents voted to break away from the mother town and become an independent city." Abbot Kinney remarried in 1914 to Winifred Harwell and they had two children, Helen (who married Jack Gerety, the son of Venice's mayor) and Clan, who was briefly married to an Al G. Barnes Circus elephant rider named Patricia Clancy.