Venice at War
Artists, performers, and vendors resist a clampdown that has the police ticketing many legitimate bo
By Perry Crowe
As the meeting of the Venice Beach Free Expression Protection Working Group devolved into a cacophonous shouting match for the umpteenth time, a frustrated woman banged a metal vice clamp repeatedly on the table next to her. When that failed to stop the row, this bizarro-Khrushchev again banged her clamp hard, this time against a metal folding chair. And still the shouting continued.
"Shut up."
"Shhh!"
"No, you shut up."
"Shhh!"
"Why does she get to talk? I have my hand raised!"
"Shhh!"
"No personal attacks! No personal attacks!"
"Shhh!"
"You have threatened me and I don't like it!"
"I am very disgusted with your childlike behavior!"
"So what? It's good to be like children. That's what it says in the scripture!"
The group, which consists of artists, performers, entertainers, and residents of the Venice Boardwalk area, as well as representatives of the Venice Neighborhood Council, Venice Boardwalk Merchant's Association, LAPD's Pacific Division, and city council district 11, usually meets monthly to discuss the state of affairs on the boardwalk. The group is meeting more often lately, though, as all members of the Venice community react to the controversial city ordinance 42.15, which regulates boardwalk conduct. At this most recent meeting, the group worked on a set of recommendations regarding the ordinance to submit to the city council.
"We were going to wait until summer was over and make recommendations," says Linda Lucks, co-chair of the working group, "and then the city council is getting so much flack [over the ordinance], they said 'expedite it.'" Slowly, surely, the city is realizing that applying uniform rules to the Venice boardwalk, capital of fierce individualism, is like trying to force a tornado in a soda bottle.
During the meeting, the group voted on recommendations involving display height regulations, space allocations for performers, noise rules, time constraints, and equal ordinance enforcement on both the boardwalk's west-side artists and east-side vendors. While one vote was tabled, others received high numbers of abstentions, and the validity of the whole endeavor was questioned again and again by unruly Venetians. But boardwalk denizens will get another opportunity to vote on the recommendations at Tuesday morning's weekly lottery, which determines who gets spots on the boardwalk for the coming week.
At the lottery, Bill Greenslade, a boardwalk environmental activist, recounts his arrest for an ordinance violation. LAPD cited Greenslade for having his "Save Our Seas" display three inches outside of his allocated space. He was handcuffed and taken away for processing. Greenslade displays a series of photographs of his arrest and counts off eight police officers surrounding him in one photo. Then he holds up a photo of a rueful 17-year-old girl wiping tears from her eyes with a rubber-gloved hand as an officer writes her a ticket. She had been serving meals to the homeless on the boardwalk, but her table had been over the line.
"They're making criminals out of artists," Greenslade says.
But not too criminal. While many artists have been arrested, their tickets have almost all eventually been reduced to infractions. This lack of prosecution makes many on the boardwalk question the extensive use of police manpower in the enforcing of ordinance 42.15. The LAPD and City Attorney's office had not returned calls by the time this report was filed.
"The issue is, some people want to make a living out there [on the boardwalk]," says Lucks. "And that's not supposed to be what this is about. Free expression, you're expressing yourself. You're not worried about your pocketbook. It's not a retail zone on the west side. There's no intrinsic right to be able to sell things in a park. But some people are incensed because they can't make as much money, or they feel like they can't. That's a non-issue, as far as I'm concerned. Move a few blocks down. Move to a flea market. Go somewhere where you can make a living legally."
Before the ordinance, many, ahem, entrepreneurs loaded up on cheap jewelry and counterfeit goods in downtown L.A. and took them to the Venice boardwalk, where they passed them off as artistic expressions for a quick buck from visiting Nebraskans. And while 42.15 has reduced boardwalk artist participation by approximately 30 percent (namely the illegal commercial vending), much of this 30 percent has simply moved to the east side of the boardwalk where they now set up their own space or work with existing vendors.
And this means commercial and counterfeit vending is far from dead on the boardwalk.
"I could take you to a store that the whole business, all their shirts are illegal," says Zuma Dogg, a boardwalk performer who was driven from the boardwalk by 42.15 when it outlawed his sale of Zuma Dogg T-shirts. "Not even to mention the Gucci purses and the Prada and all the handbags and all those fake sunglasses."
Dogg points out an LAPD bust of $10 million of counterfeit designer clothing on July 19 in downtown as an indication something is being done to combat the problem.
"That's good," he says, "but they're still selling it on Venice."
He questions why the police don't run sweeps of counterfeit goods amongst the vendors on the east side of the boardwalk. To Dogg, the uneven east-west enforcement of 42.15 indicates something nefarious.
"They could've done [the ordinance] at any time," Dogg says, drawing a bigger picture. "Now [the boardwalk] becomes a big problem just when they're bringing the 90 freeway into Washington Boulevard, just when they're kicking out Lincoln Place people, kicking out Echo Park residents for housing developments, evicting the South Central Farmers. They're just redeveloping the whole city."
Lincoln Place is a nearly 800-unit apartment complex in Venice that was purchased by AIMCO, one of the largest apartment owners in the nation. The residents of Lincoln Place have been entrenched in a battle with AIMCO as the mainly elderly tenants rally against AIMCO's attempts to evict them in order to develop the property.
"We're going through this gentrification and tenants are being kicked out all across the city, but very, very many in Venice as well," says Laura Burns of the Lincoln Place Tenants Association, who is also a former member of the Venice Neighborhood Council's Land Use and Planning Committee. "There's not a teacher that can afford to live on their salary here in Venice. If they're moving in at market rate today, they move into poverty."
Back at the Venice Beach Free Expression Protection Working Group meeting, things hit another snag when the next meeting is scheduled for August 24, the same day as the ACLU's court date for a legal challenge to 42.15 by Santa Monica-based attorney, Carol Sobel, who successfully got an earlier draft of the ordinance sent back to the drawing table over a year ago. After a bit of quick shuffling, the meeting date is changed, which brings a smile to the face of Ibrahim Butler, leader of the Venice Beach Drum Orchestra.
While the heavy-handed enforcement of the ordinance has battered the boardwalk artists and performers since March 25, Butler senses relief in sight.
"It's just like in Iraq," Butler says. "[The government] hit them with 'shock and awe' and the people just waited it out. And then they came back strong. You can't kill the spirit."
Published: 08/03/2006
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