A quiet residential grid of narrow waterways cuts through Venice, where bridges and front gardens frame a planned neighborhood that once aspired to be an American version of the Italian city. Its canals survive as a fragment of a much larger scheme.
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The water here follows straight lines, then bends around small islands and garden edges: this is a designed neighborhood, not a natural lagoon. In 1905 developer Abbot Kinney opened Venice of America, a resort town whose canals were meant to make the marshy coast part of an ambitious imitation of Venice.
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- Venice of America opened in 1905.
- Six canals remain from the original network.
- Most other canals were filled in during the 1920s and 1930s.
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