Abbot Kinney

I took this image of this building because I found it interesting. The man in the picture reminded me of Johnnie Walker and after checking it definitely wasn’t associated with the brand, it was just a residential building but it was a really interesting painting and I decided to take a few snaps of the building from different vantage points. While processing the image above I noticed that the man had a name and I decided to look him up on wikipedia. You can read the full details through the link I provided, but to summarize Abbot Kinney was a New Jersey businessman that established himself with his family Tobacco business and then went into other ventures. After travelling the world, he ends up buying land in Southern California (Santa Monica) and was heavily involved in promoting the arts in the area which perhaps explains Venice’s artistic flavor. Finally, he played a major role in renaming the city from “Ocean Park” to “Venice” in 1911! Interesting how much I learned about Venice’s history by just taking an image :)