The coastal California community banding together to try and solve a tragic mystery

Not long after Ramón J. Goñi moved to Los Angeles seven years ago, he went on a date. The pair strolled around the serene Venice Canals, a small Westside enclave with homes separated by shallow waterways. “What is this place?” Goñi remembers thinking. “And also, how many millions of dollars do you need to make to live in this place?” The area’s natural beauty stuck with Goñi, who originally hails from Madrid. “I was really attracted to that, but I thought it was never going to be possible to live here.”

But when the pandemic surged through Southern California a few years ago, rents dropped all across Los Angeles County. Suddenly, Goñi had some wiggle room to negotiate on monthly rental rates, and he nabbed a one-bedroom apartment in the back of a house along one of the canals. He soon realized he was far from the only renter in this idyllic slice of Venice, with homes that sell for $1.8 million on average, and found himself more connected to his neighbors given their proximity to one another in the car-free canals. “It’s really hard to be a complete isolationist living here,” he says. “The connections are going to happen, whether you want it or not.”

Those connections have turned into tight-knit neighborhood groups, like the Venice Canals Association, and a campaign called Know Your Neighbor that encourages people living along the canals to mingle and feel comfortable leaning on one another. “They have this outsized presence,” Anthony Carfello, the curator of the Venice Heritage Museum, says of the canals. “It’s a quite small portion of a neighborhood, and yet it’s so definitively as much a quintessential part of Venice as the boardwalk.”

Lately, the unlikely bond that’s emerged from this placid community has been tested. Last year, a man sexually assaulted two women on the canals; he killed one of them. (A man was arrested and charged with murder, and pleaded no contest.) Earlier this summer, a different horror has gripped the canals: Since mid-June, a suspected 27 dogs have gotten severely sick after they were walked around the area, and five of those dogs have died, according to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. (The estimates from neighborhood residents differ; they estimate that 31 dogs have fallen ill and seven of said dogs have died.)

What made the dogs sick remains unanswered, though various theories have been floated thus far, including pest control chemicals, snail bait, debris from the Palisades fire that ravaged the region earlier this year and toxic algae bloom. Earlier this month, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health stated that “testing of the canal water, algae and scum by the California Water Boards has detected the presence of algal toxins: microcystins, anatoxin-a and cylindrospermopsin, however no definitive link between these algal toxins and the dog illnesses has been established.”

The one common denominator — that the dogs had all been in the Venice Canals area shortly before falling ill — was determined by this ad hoc network between residents, Goñi says. “Basically, people were talking to each other: ‘Wait, a dog died here, a dog died there,’” says Goñi. “And then suddenly we had, like, five dogs across the canals in the span of like 10 days dying.” The community soon plastered the area with flyers warning fellow dog owners, crafting intake forms so it could definitively track data to help understand potential causes for the illnesses while collaborating with public health officials. Goñi believes that without this network, he and his neighbors might not have learned that these illnesses were connected for a while, and wouldn’t have been able to gather information in hopes of stopping it from developing further. 

“We want to…[come] together as one when we are under attack,” says Goñi, who has since joined the Venice Canals Association as a board member. “A year and a half ago, there was a physical attack against women. And all the women in the canals, and elderly residents, felt incredibly scared, so we were walking each other home and trying to support our neighbors that way. And in this case, it’s an environmental attack potentially, right? 

“I think we are all a bit triggered by what we all experienced with COVID. And this is very similar. We just don't know. We need to live in the uncertainty of not knowing for a while.”

The Venice of America scheme

Had it not been for the question of health, the Venice Canals would have never been dug out in the first place. In the early 1880s, Abbot Kinney, a real estate investor by way of New Jersey, “ended up in Southern California because of his health,” says Venice Heritage Museum’s Carfello. Kinney and his business partners went on to develop the Ocean Park Amusement Pier, just south of Santa Monica.

But then the businessmen decided to go their separate ways and dissolve the partnership. They flipped a coin, literally, to determine who would get developed park land and who would get the undeveloped swampland a little further south. Kinney got first dibs, but ended up choosing the swampland. It was the perfect place for him to build an ambitious scheme he dubbed the Venice of America.

As a young man, Kinney had traveled throughout Europe and had become entranced with Venice, Italy, and the canals winding throughout the city. He saw a way to do something similar on the West Coast, particularly as beach tourism boomed in Southern California. “His idea was that he could develop a … vacation destination for cultural enrichment,” Carfello says. “If you wanted the rides of the carnivals and the ‘knock the pins down with the ball’ kind of thing, you could go to Santa Monica. You go to Ocean Park. If you wanted to go see an opera on the pier, if you wanted to see paintings on the pier, and if you wanted to take a mini European vacation without leaving Southern California, you would go to Abbot Kinney’s Venice of America.”

In 1904, Kinney had crews dredge out roughly 2 miles of marshland to build seven canals that wrapped around various islands. They were built around the region’s then-ubiquitous streetcar system, meaning that people living in disparate parts of Southern California could drop in and rent an affordable little canal-side cottage for the weekend. 

After a huge unveiling on July Fourth of the following year, the canals became a hit. The development had all the trappings of a faux-European resort, including columns meant to mimic the original Venice’s Piazza San Marco and hired gondoliers. They even brought in “Italian immigrants working in agriculture in Southern California to sing opera songs while they would ride people around on the gondolas,” Carfello adds. Almost immediately afterward, a separate set of canals was built.

But a series of calamities soon threatened the canals’ survival. Kinney died in 1920, and a month later, the nearby pier burned down. The local infrastructure started showing signs of wear, and the water was already polluted. Seeing that Venice likely couldn’t last much longer as its own city, residents began rallying around a movement to incorporate with neighboring Santa Monica or Los Angeles, and in 1925, the city of Los Angeles annexed Venice. And, as LA is wont to do, the city swiftly began filling in the larger canals to pave the way for more automobile roadways. 

The existing Venice Canals that remain to this day “are quite likely only there because the Depression hit,” Carfello says. In the 1930s, Venice — which was then a diverse community with Black, Mexican American, Japanese American and Jewish residents — became racially redlined, which ended further home construction and left the area out of the post-war economic recovery. “So by the time you get to the ’50s, Venice is disinvested,” he adds.

The canals themselves were in bad shape for decades, with broken sidewalks leading directly into the then-overgrown water. It attracted people who didn’t mind living in this urban wilderness, lured by cheap rent and a countercultural spirit surging through the area. Back then, “The canals were the most extreme locale in a beach town already recognized as unconventional,” writes Andrew Deener in his book “Venice: A Contested Bohemia in Los Angeles.”

The music- and art-focused 1960s later gave way to investors snapping up properties and building homes. A more middle-class population began moving into the area, and the idea of preserving the canals with the help of municipal resources started picking up steam. In the early 1990s, city officials approved a plan to repair sidewalks, install gates and a system that would help circulate and flush the water and build footbridges and ramps for boat access. 

When the renovations wrapped up in 1993, the canals suddenly went from a forgotten piece of Venice to charming waterfront real estate, and rents and home prices surged almost instantaneously. The Venice Canals remain a pricey place to live, even by LA standards — but “what remained of all that was a very quirky community,” Goñi says. 

‘We can all come together’

In late August, Goñi showed me a series of maps overlaid with various colors he and his fellow Canals neighbors had created. It charted out the walking paths of dogs who had gotten sick in the last few months, tracing their routes along the canals. 

He points to one corner of the canals that tends to have algae bloom buildup, which he suspects may be a cause of the recent dog illnesses. “One of the things that happens in the canals is that we become essentially a landfill for all the trash from all around the neighborhood,” he says. “Some areas of the canals end up with a lot of, for lack of a better way of putting it, s—t in the water: chemicals, heavy metals, things that are also going to make algae blooms proliferate much more intensely than they used to in the past.”

Combined with the effects of climate change, that accumulation, Goñi says, creates a potentially dangerous moment for the entire ecosystem of the canals, “including our dogs and our animals, our birds, babies.” 

The toxic algae theory remains unconfirmed, and other mysteries unfolding elsewhere in California are being considered as having possible links to the Venice Canals dog deaths. This includes the spate of dogs exhibiting similar symptoms — and in one case, dying — at a park in Santa Clara. Earlier this month, LAist reported that gulls in Venice and Los Angeles County’s South Bay had been falling sick, which is thought to be related to a toxin.

Bereft, the community of canal residents has been trying to seek answers while waiting to hear concrete answers from authorities. Whatever the cause, Goñi believes the dog illness mystery isn’t solely relegated to Venice. “This is an environmental issue at a city level, potentially at a county and at a regional level … I’m hoping that it’s an isolated incident, but that’s the thing that we can never determine until the science follows and the labs come back. That’s what we’re waiting for right now.

“When small communities, local communities across the country and in this city are attacked in whatever way they are, there are two options: You can fight each other, and you can blame each other, and finger-point, like: ‘somebody's poisoning the dog, somebody is doing this, it must be a neighbor,’” says Goñi. “Or we can all come together, gather the data and try to find answers and work as a unit so people listen to our plight. I feel that that is something that could happen with many other issues that we're experiencing right now, even when we disagree with each other.”