Tom Moran and Tom Sewell Fantasy by the Sea Peace Press: Culver City, CA, 1980 (1979) (Originally published by Beyond Baroque Foundation with a grant from the Visual Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts), 1950s,
Venice West
"In the late 1950s . . . a lifestyle . . . in favor of a Bohemian life with a background of poetry, art and jazz . . . the Beat Generation.
"The Beats . . . wrote poetry about disenchantment and nuclear overkill. Visual artists experimented with the limits of abstraction and new forms of assemblage works . . . low rents and toleration settled into Venice. Lawrence Lipton chronicled the coffee houses, personal searches, artists and ennui of "Venice West" in his book The Holy Barbarians.
". . . included painters John Altoon, Ben Talbert, Mike Angeleno, Fowad Magdalani, and Tony Landreau. Poets included Lipton, John Thomas, Frankie Rios, James Ryan Morris and Stuart Perkoff . . . folksinger Julie Meredith, light-show impressario Jimmy Alonzi, sculptor Tai, ex-fighter Joe Greb and [others] . . . Ole, Nico and Tamoo."
[photo page 96 artist Wallace Berman, 1955]
" . . . Stan Roberts, leader of the (Venice) Civic Union, vowed to end Bohemianism in Venice and urged his supporters to "get on your feet and scream and get these people out of here."
" . . .
"Stuart Perkoff founded the Venice West Cafe on Dudley Avenue. Proprietorship was eventually taken over by John and Anna Haag. Haag, a Harvard honors graduate and one-time technical writer had dropped out of a promising career to write poetry and struggle making ends meet at the small coffee house.
" . . .
""Big Daddy" Nord left town, bound for Hawaii. Frank Rios and Stuart Perkoff eventually found themselves incarcerated. Mike Angeleno . . . committed suicide . . . the Beats were being replaced by a new generation of "flower children," "hippies" and counter-culturists."
Slum By The Sea
"Lawrence Lipton had called Venice a "jerry-built slum by the sea" . . .
". . . Pawnshops and liquor stores had replaced the bingo parlors and souvenir shops . . . Drug addicts and motorcycle gangs had replaced the tourists.
"A theme amusement pier called Pacific Ocean Park was opened that same year. It attracted large crowds at first but after several years of operation the pier began to quickly deteriorate. The rest of Venice joined it on a downhiill slide.
"Los Angeles City Councilman Karl Rundberg formed a Venice Planning Committee in 1961 in hopes of checking the blight . . ."