IMAGERY – The Celery Merchants of Venice

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You might not know this… but Venice, California was once a landscape of fields called “The Venice Celery District.”

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Photograph of the ideal field of summer celery in the Venice Celery District, just before applying blanching paper, April 12, 1927. The rows of thick leaves of the celery plants form a congested square at center with a dark irrigation ditch in the foreground. A darker field lies on the far edge of the celery field on the right while another field lies on the far left. Hills stand in the background on the right while electrical poles spot a clearing of grass in the background on the left. “Note the regularity of the plant foliage.”

Photograph of a celery patch in Venice Celery District, April 12, 1927. Men wearing hats and overalls stand in the field at center with unearthed stocks of celery lying in rows in the foreground and the still-planted celery behind them. What appears to be a small, wooden table stands on the right while crates are scattered throughout the ground behind it. Two dark horses pull a wagon of filled crates to the right of the workers while grassy hills stand in the background.

Photograph of Ross H. Goot bunching carrots in Venice Celery District, April 12, 1927. Rows of unearthed carrots lie in the soil as Goot ties them together at center. He wears dark pants and a lightly-colored shirt as he squats down and carefully bunches the carrots at his knees. A crate sits in the soil just behind him on the left. What appears to be an empty field of sifted soil lies in the background just beyond the edge of the carrot field at center.

Photograph of harvesting and packing summer celery in the Venice Celery District, April 12, 1927. The remains of celery plants lie in the foreground while the unearthed celery is stacked in two parallel rows of crates at center. Men in overalls and hats examine the crates while crops of celery wait to be pulled on the far left. Several homes can be seen beyond a row of electrical poles in the background.

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Carolyn says:

June 29, 2010 at 11:25 am

Thanks for sharing this….very interesting; I didn’t know. My dad came to Southern California in the 1930s and loved to point out that as far as the eye could see around Crenshaw Bl & Santa Barbara Av (now Martin Luther King) there were bean fields. And at night it was pitch black except for a few scattered lights out in the fields in the worker’s houses or “shacks” (as he called them).

David Ewing says:

June 29, 2010 at 10:10 pm

Okay, now we know all about growing celery, except where it was being done in these pictures. Yeah, the Venice Celery District, but where the hell was it? Give us an intersection, GPS coordinates, something to locate it in present day Venice.
What’s there now? My imagination is only half fed.

lynnster says:

July 1, 2010 at 12:58 pm

Again, those are the official captions for the photos from the USC Digital Archive. I am sharing the photos that I find interesting but sometimes the details are simply not available. So would you rather I not share them if I don’t know everything? I think that would be a shame. Sometimes details are simply lost over time but the photos are still amazing.

Here’s some detective work done by our Facebook fans:

The last field to go — in the early 1970’s as I recall — in the Venice-Marina area was on the south-west corner of Lincoln and Jefferson where the new Playa Vista nature sanctuary now extends. However, something in my admittedly faulty memory suggests it may have been broccoli not celery.

It was a variety of foods. Howard Hughes allowed Lopez Ranch – located further down Jefferson to grow crops there. Corn, tomoatoes, green beens, and a lot more. Lopez ranch grew their own strawberries, pumpkins, peaches, and who knows what else. I just remember going there (I grew up by Jefferson & Mesmer) all the time and getting our fresh … See Morefruit & vegetables as a kid growing up. FYI – The area where the post office and Home Depot are now were also growing fields. The entire area east & west of Lincoln on the north side of Jefferson were crops grown by Lopez Ranch. The area on the south side of Jefferson was all Hughes Aircraft & Helicopter & on the west side of Lincoln (where the Ballona Wetlands are now) was a “ditch” area for the planes & helicopters being tested by Hughes – no crops were grown there (at least as far as I can remember). There was also fall out bunkers on both sides of Lincoln. Lopez Ranch was bringing their crops in from other areas after the Suma Corporation sold the property. Lopez Ranch was located where the Self Storage facility is on Jefferson. They were still there in to the 90’s – my son used to go there for “Pumpkin Patch” when he was little. I was sad when I realized that the “house” wasn’t even there anymore.

Does that help?

Stupid Post says:

June 30, 2010 at 10:01 am

Notice, your comments are WAY over the top. I find your blog totally uninteresting, from the black borders on the sides, the lower case letters in the proper noun Los Angeles, the central white square with the orange RSS feed at the top, etc. Explaining any further of what any idiot can obviously see just seems like a waste of time to me so I will stop now. Do you write your explanations so when blind people come to your blog they will be able to know what is in the pictures? (I hope you are picking up on the sarcasm.)

lynnster says:

July 1, 2010 at 12:52 pm

Awwww, someone needs a hug.

BTW… those are the official captions from the USC Digital Archive. I don’t write them, they were written by the staff of the LA Examiner newspaper. I included them because I was crediting the source of the photos verbatim.

erin miller says:

July 26, 2010 at 12:48 pm

The bean fields mentioned above were actually in Playa del Rey, not the Marina or Venice both of which are north of the Ballona Creek Channel. Nor were they in Playa Vista, which is east of Lincoln.
The remediated wetlands are also in Playa del Rey. The remediation was done by the developers of Playa Vista as part of the deal that enable developers to build the environmental heartbreak of Playa Vista, aka Spanish for “gridlock” — but that’s another story.
You can get a clear view of the un-remediated remains of the bean fields, just go up to the frontage road at the top of the hill above the eucalyptus grove and gas facility. You can’t get to that hill top from Jefferson. You have to access it from the other side of Playa del Rey, either from Manchester Blvd or from the One West Bluff development entrance on Lincoln near the Loyola Marymount fountain entrance. When you’re on that hill, you’ll see a couple acres of the furrow lines — clear remnants of the decades when the wetlands were used for agriculture extending from the hill to Jefferson.

lynnster says:

July 26, 2010 at 9:40 pm

Sounds like you’ve got a strong knowledge of the local landscape. All I can say is that the caption written was what was on the back of the photograph as recorded by the photographer and the USC Digital Archive.

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