Raising The Ghosts Of Dogtown

Writer Joe Donnelly’s essay ‘Venice Bohemia: From Abbot Kinney To The Z-Boys’ explores how the crumbling, surfer’s mecca of Venice in the 1970s gave rise to the legendary Z-Boys and skateboarding as we know it.

It appears in ‘Los Angeles in the 1970s: Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mine’, a collection of essays and short stories that attempts to fill a gap in the literature about culture during one of the City of Angels’ most vibrant decades. It also includes the ‘Cruising Van Nuys’ photo essay by Rick McCloskey, featured here.

As major events go, this one may not rank up there with Alaskan statehood, the advent of NASA, or even that April fifteenth day when twenty-three thousand plus fans packed Seals Stadium to see the erstwhile Brooklyn Dodgers take on the erstwhile New York

Giants in the first major league baseball game played on the West Coast. Even so, it was not without consequence when, in 1958, Skip Engblom’s mom finally gave into the boy’s badgering and moved the family to Ennis Place, behind Venice Circle… read more >