Venice Beach Boardwalk and Canals, Los Angeles
Part of the full Los Angeles Layover: Downtown Walk From LAX
Venice Beach Boardwalk on the western edge of Los Angeles runs two miles of seafront past market stalls, an outdoor weight pen and a free concrete skatepark, with six surviving 1905 canals in a quiet residential grid three blocks inland.
Ocean Front Walk runs two miles of Venice seafront
Ocean Front Walk is the paved promenade between Washington Boulevard and the Santa Monica city line, and the whole two miles of it is a public path with nothing to pay. The beach side is given over to stalls and performers, and there is a formal system behind that: traders work under a freedom-of-expression permit that costs $25 for the first year and $10 annually after it, and the pitches on the west side are handed out by a lottery drawn at the Venice Beach Recreation Center. That is why the line-up changes week to week rather than settling into a fixed market.
The inland side is shopfronts, tattoo studios, food counters and bike hire. Somewhere near the middle, on the sand, is the Muscle Beach Venice weight pen, a fenced open-air gym with platforms and benches that you can watch from the promenade without paying to go in; it took its name from the original Muscle Beach up the coast in Santa Monica and is now the better-known of the two. The water off this stretch is a working surf break as well, and a beginner surf lesson with boards and wetsuits included can be booked here in advance if two hours in the water appeals more than two miles of pavement.
The Venice Skatepark’s concrete bowls sit on the sand at Windward Avenue
The Venice Beach Skatepark opened on 3 October 2009 at 1800 Ocean Front Walk, on the sand near Windward Avenue, after decades in which the neighbourhood’s skaters had nowhere legal to do this. It covers 16,000 square feet and cost $3.4 million, and the design deliberately copies the shape of the drained backyard swimming pools that Venice and Santa Monica skaters rode during the drought years of the mid-1970s.
It is free, open daily from 8am until sunset, and its formal name is the Dennis “Polar Bear” Agnew Memorial Skatepark, after one of the original local skaters, who died in 2005. Watching costs nothing and the low wall around the bowls is where most people end up standing; the standard on a weekday afternoon is high enough that it holds an audience without anyone advertising it.
Nothing along the promenade is shaded and the sand either side of it is soft going, so there is nowhere on this route to put a suitcase down for a minute.
Six of Abbot Kinney’s 1905 canals still have water in them
The Venice Canals Historic District sits three blocks inland from the seafront, between South Venice Boulevard and Washington Boulevard, and it is the surviving fragment of what Abbot Kinney dug in 1905 when he tried to build a Venice of America on the marshland here. Thirteen canals were cut originally; all but six were filled in for roads in 1929, and the remainder had silted into disrepair by the 1940s. The restoration ran from March 1992 to 1993, which is when the banks, pavements and footbridges got rebuilt.
What it is now is a residential neighbourhood with water instead of some of its streets: houses in every architectural style anyone has tried on the west side, gardens running to the waterline, dinghies and paddleboards tied up outside front doors, and arched footbridges every block or so. The pavements are public and the walk takes twenty minutes at a wander. Abbot Kinney Boulevard, a few blocks north-east and named after the same man, is the other inland option, a street of independent shops and restaurants rather than beachfront stalls.
One bus down Lincoln Boulevard reaches the airport transit centre
Big Blue Bus Route 3 runs the length of Lincoln Boulevard, a few blocks inland from the Venice seafront, south through Marina del Rey and Playa Vista to the LAX/Metro Transit Center, arriving at Bays 4 and 5. It goes every ten minutes for most of the day and costs $1.25 with a transit card. From the transit centre a free shuttle covers the last leg into every terminal at Los Angeles International Airport, since the automated people mover meant to replace it is still in testing.
Allow two hours from the boardwalk for the bus, the shuttle and check-in, and note that this is one bus rather than the two-train transfer the Metro route from here would need. If the coast is not what you wanted from your time on the ground, the downtown walk from the Broadway market up Bunker Hill is the opposite kind of afternoon, indoors as much as out, and reachable from the same transit centre in the other direction.
Frequently asked questions
Can you walk through the Venice Canals?
Yes. The six remaining canals sit inside an ordinary residential neighbourhood with public pavements along both banks and footbridges crossing at intervals, and nothing is gated or ticketed. What there is not is anywhere to buy a coffee, sit down at a table or use a toilet: it is houses, water, moored dinghies and ducks, which is exactly why it is quiet on an afternoon when the seafront three blocks west is not.
Where does the Venice Beach Boardwalk start and end?
Ocean Front Walk runs roughly two miles along the sand between Washington Boulevard at the southern end and the Santa Monica city line at the northern one. The dense part, the stalls, the performers, the skatepark and the outdoor weight pen, is concentrated in the middle stretch either side of Windward Avenue, and the walk thins out into plain beachfront housing at both ends.
What is Venice Beach like after dark?
Empty and shut. Vendor permits on the boardwalk run to sunset, the skatepark closes at sunset too, and the stalls are packed away not long after, so an evening visit gets you a dark unlit promenade with the shops closed and very little going on. Daylight is when this stretch is worth the trip; for an evening on the coast, Santa Monica Pier a couple of miles north stays lit and open into the night.
Is there any shade along the Venice Beach Boardwalk?
Very little. The palms along the middle of the promenade are tall and thin and throw almost nothing at midday, and the only real cover is the awnings and doorways of the shops on the inland side. There is no shaded seating on the beach side at all, so on a hot afternoon the canals, which have gardens and trees along the banks, are the more comfortable half of this trip.