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If Palms’s Fourth Street (Motor Avenue) was a typical small-town Main Street of the Nineteenth Century, Venice Boulevard more accurately represented the city that Los Angeles became in the Twentieth.
• For one thing, most folks were confused about just where the city boundary lay in that area.
Actually, all of Venice Boulevard is in Los Angeles. Washington Boulevard marks the city border between Clarington and Overland, except principally for St. Augustine Church, which is in Culver City.
Before 1915, though, all of Palms was an unincorporated area, and thus the county established its own branch library in the new Pacific Electric depot on Venice west of Bagley. (Later it was moved into Culver City.)
But Culver City merchants have put up banners on Palms’s Venice Boulevard proclaiming “Culver City Downtown.” A sign was installed in Palms’s Media Park announcing “Welcome to Culver City.” And the Culver City post office extended its service area into Los Angeles, even north of Venice Boulevard to take in the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the Center for Land Use Interpretation, both plainly within Palms.
This makes Palms purists uncomfortable.
• For another, while the red cars of the Santa Monica Air Line passed through private right of way of a nicely bucolic nature, the motormen of the Venice Short Line, as it was called (because it was shorter than the old route through Hollywood and Santa Monica), clanged determinedly down the middle of what eventually became a busy traffic-filled street, hauling hordes of passengers to and from the playland and the sands of Venice Beach. (There were 30,182 fares paid, for example, on July 4, 1923.)
A very gritty route.
The trains in the middle of Venice Boulevard, both passenger and freight, lasted for a long time, to the chagrin of Palms merchants, who complained in 1947 about “. . . terrific noises and vibration of the box-car carriers [which] are jangling the nerves and the economies of the boulevard business establishments.”
The Venice Short Line was abandoned in 1950, even though the L.A. City Council wanted to keep the tracks because of a “new war threat.”
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