Bountiful closes on Abbot Kinney.
Herein lies another tale of heartbreak and dislocation on the skinny . A tale that ends with the same old same; property owners versus artists, though this time in true Venice style we have a nominal twist; the change might be good and the nostalgia is best left for ghosts or even perhaps another Beachhead style headline : The great shooting-in-the-foot of Venice by Disgruntled Local #15,432 of 50,000 total. The dramatic shift in Abbot Kinney’s imminent terraforming is happening with a hyper-speed and a manic destruction leaving no traces of its past and a trail of blood so deep in the muck the ghosts of the indian tribe burrowed below have begun laughing.
Oh the horror!
Keep calm people of the skinny. Don’t panic.
You are all educated to the point of post-literacy. You have fixed career goals. That’s what the stats say, at least. You know the exact mate you want and thanks to Tinder you’re collecting options or even better you have already magically manifested them (or chosen very decisively based on a series of cultural beliefs you held since watching your first Disney film.) Your preferences on how “things should be” and what is or is not acceptable are set. Skinnians, my dear new robotic device-dominated wave of Venetians, you know exactly what you are doing. As so do your landlords, so get ready to get your fight on because ’round here, the sun is beaming and the contrast is set to high.
By the last census the skinnians are 98% white, proud and entitled to it – except of course for the few wandering San Diego Gulfies who safari through the street looking for the cold-brew they’ve heard about – avoiding the temptation towards eating gluten-free halal pork fatwas the Emirate Aristocracy would behead them for. Or the Swedish tour group walking hand-in-hand giving half smirks to the smaller, shorter Americans they Pleidean-ingly tower above using their authentic on-shore Swedish bank accounts and perfect Lagom. Cut-to : a travelling circus of anarchists on California Avenue and Abbot Kinney Blvd. Now we got another Netflix show. Someone call the Abbot Skinny TV people and get Harvey on the phone, together we will make an impact on history as the first all global, all local, anti-pro everything, pre-tsunami, Atlantian soul pods.
Perhaps, this xenophobic invasion mentality that locals seethe about, that the local rags write about, that bloggers like us use as fodder for victimhood (ie, this articles own meta-splaining) is exactly what gives our landlords divine purpose in raising the rent of a small vintage store from $15,000 to $40,000 with one months notice.
This isn’t about Sweden though. We like the Swedes.
Gentrification, in this case, has been reduced to a meaningless buzz-word referring to any place where a majority subaltern population (or “artist class”, “creative class”, anything to describe a person who has a hard time paying rent because a 80% of their time is being themselves and 20% is work) is forcibly ejected through the property economics of a regionally dominant hegemony of embedded landlords. You really can’t blame them. The block where Hals used to be over on California avenue just commanded 44.75 million dollars. That’s Burj-Khalifa money.
The actual property on 42nd and 9th in New York’s Times Square back in “greatest” city on Earth goes for half that. So, what the hell is so special about Abbot Kinney?
In ten words or less; welcome to multi-culti international gentrification, the hot new thing in globalization. What this means in So-Cal street terms is that anyone not born under the auspices of the Hollywood Holies and/or millionaire Perso-Armenians are to pack up and call it a day. Or get your startup going prontz motivated by total FOMO because chances are your little cozy sh-thole on Electric won’t be there forever.
As a matter of the fact, the deal to sell it is probably in closing since Electric really starts with a huge mega Coldwell Banker real estate operation on Palms avenue.
This brings us to the vacated antiques and tchotchke shop Bountiful and the curious early days of Abbot Kinney when its presence on a street not even a blip on the cultural politique.
By the time Bunny McMuffinpants got to Abbot Kinney her handler already notified the owner of Bountiful to refer to his client, Barbara Streisand, as such. Ms. McMuffinpants already knew the place was the cat’s pajamas since a certain Misty Waters, aka Sharon Stone, recommended Abbot Kinney Blvd had a gem of a store usually found in Beverly Hills but this wasn’t Beverly Hills. Abbot Kinney was nothing but a pimple of a street somewhere near Lincoln referred to as “West of Lincoln”, known to be gangster-ridden and inaccessible to non-locals. The little store definitely wasn’t Hermes, yet, it heralded in the New Age of designer boutiques, GQ articles and once-Rodeo’s many faces.
If someone were to bottle it, say to reproduce an Abbot Kinney-like “luxury ecosystem” real estate environment in any town USA, technically it might start with moving in a vintage antique store onto completely drug infested ghetto and letting one celebrity in on the news. Repeat this with a bookstore on same block and add an artist or two (who claim to be from Brooklyn) and minimum one Hollywood Holy and a grand dose of mythology.
I guarantee that block would become the main street to millions of Deutschlandians from Moscow to Bombay (Mumbai) after GQ writes a less than twelve hundred word essay on it, and a few years later some rag from the hood can wax nostalgic on how living on the Skinny is a daily memory reset like Schwarzenegger flick where the protagonist goes out of his mind.
Want more nostalgic retrospective retellings of how Abbot Kinney used to be? Check out our article “Breaking up with Abbot Kinney”, a pretty dopamine-opposite report on a chocolate shop closing on Valentines day.