Abbot Kinney Boulevard is a mile-long street of boutiques, galleries, cafés, and restaurants in 📝Venice, CA, running between Washington Boulevard and Main Street.
The street is named for Abbot Kinney (1850–1920), a developer and conservationist who made his fortune in tobacco and opened Venice of America, a canal-laced resort town modeled on Venice, Italy, on July 4, 1905. The official name follows his spelling with a single "t"; "Abbott" is a common misspelling.
For most of the twentieth century the road was West Washington Boulevard. In 1990 the Los Angeles City Council renamed it for Kinney, at the urging of local merchants who wanted to market the district and end confusion with other Washington-named streets.
The boulevard was a low-rent strip of muffler shops and surf studios when merchants staged the first Abbot Kinney Festival in 1987, a sidewalk sale that drew about 8,000 people. In its April 2012 issue GQ named it "The Coolest Block in America," which accelerated its turn into a high-rent retail corridor as national brands replaced local shops. It has served as a filming location for Californication, Flaked, and the film Chef.
From 2015 to 2017 I worked out of the 📝Intelligencia on this street five to six days a week, and I recorded a podcast at 📝The Otherroom, a wine bar on the boulevard.