The Venice canals: historic, picturesque, slightly shark-inhabited. They're one of Los Angeles's most unique features, and they've been through a lot in the 100-plus years they've been around. For this, our last day of Outdoors Week, we've distilled the long history of this landmark down to some of the most important numbers, and thrown in a couple of glamour shots of the neighborhood (and one from Nightmare on Elm Street) for good measure:
2 million: Dollars (approximately) that Abbot Kinney spent building his Venice of America project, as reported by the LA Times in a March 1907 article
20,000: Revelers estimated by the LA Times to have attended the official 1905 opening of Venice of America
7: Canals in Kinney's original development
6: Copy-cat canals that cropped up in a second, nearby tract, created by other developers around the time Kinney's original Venice of America opened
6: Canals existing today (that's right—only the imitators survived!)
4: Leopard sharks seen in the canals this year
9: Total pedestrian bridges built to cross the canals
1: Bridges that have appeared in Nightmare on Elm Street (the one at Court C and Linnie Avenue; see below)
1929: Year that Abbott Kinney's original canals began to be filled in with cement
1982: Year the extant canals were added to the National Register of Historic Places
1993: Year the canals completed a $6-million renovation that drained them to remove "80 years of muck" from the waters and restored public walkways like sidewalks and those pedestrian bridges
· Outdoors Week 2014 [Curbed LA]
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