The Daily Sun

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200 East Venice Ave., Venice, FL

VENICE — When it comes to Venice, you should know a lot of things about its history, including its clown college and its innovative medicine in the 1930s.

That was the message from Harry Klinkhamer at a recent presentation. He is the Historical Resources manager for the city of Venice.

In his presentation, he told some true and not-so-true history about Venice in his “Top 10 Things You Absolutely, Positively Need to Know About Venice History.”

10 Venice is not a natural island

”It’s not a natural island, because our city fathers dug a moat around the city to protect it from Vikings, Huns and snowbirds,” Klinkhamer said, joking.

Jokes aside, the “moat” surrounding Venice is actually called the Intracoastal Waterway and it was built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“It originally was planned for World War II, to protect shipping from German submarines — and like a lot of government action, they wanted to approve creating the Intracoastal Waterway, but they didn’t approve the funding for it,” Klinkhamer said.

It wasn’t until the 1960s when the federal government started moving forward on building the Intracoastal. However, it wasn’t exactly planned for how it is today.

“The federal government wanted to put the canal just within a few 100 feet of the beach,” he said. “Picture like Harbor Drive and like where the city hall is now. That’s where they wanted the canal to go, and people were not happy with that.”

Early Venetians didn’t like the idea of a canal in general, especially as the city was growing to the east and the south, not to mention the thought of being trapped on the island when a hurricane was approaching.

“Nevertheless, even though the city threatened to sue the federal government multiple times to try and stop it, eventually they came around to embrace it, and now we have this Intracoastal Waterway,” he said. “It’s used mainly to annoy drivers at rush hour when they’re trying to get to or from work.”

9 Venice had a hospital in the 1930s

Originally from Maine, Dr. Fred Albee worked on his grandfather’s orchard where he learned how to graft plant parts together and created “Albee-stein.”

“All right, so actually, he did practice a lot of innovative measures in medicine,” Klinkhamer said. “In fact, working on his grandfather’s orchard, he learned, or he came up with the idea of bone grafting.”

Bone grafting was used extensively in World War I, and Albee would travel internationally to lecture and perform the procedure.

Albee acquired the Park View Hotel, which turned into the Florida Medical Center.

“This was his hospital that he owned and ran, to practice a lot of his early work and procedures,” he said. “A few other innovative practices that he included was the practice of heliotherapy.”

Anyone back then could probably catch a view of patients basking in the sun on the roof of the hotel/hospital.

“Because he was bringing in a lot of patients from around the country, he also had an air ambulance service,” Klinkhamer said.

And if all that wasn’t innovative enough, Albee also had a farm east of Venice and Nokomis where he grew tulips and flowers to sell up north. He also grew fresh produce for the hospital patients.

“Really kind of an early, early look at farm-to-table eating,” he said.

8 Venice has five National Historic Districts

“That’s how historic we are,” he said. “We need five of them.”

There’s the Armada Road Multi-Family District, Edgewood Historic District, Venezia Park Historic District, Eagle Point Historic District and the John Nolen Plan of Venice Historic District.

John Nolen gobbled up most of the historic districts in his city plan with the exception of Eagle Point.

“Eagle Point Historic District, when that was annexed into the city in 1994, was a hunting and fishing lodge that was started by Bertha Palmer,” he said. “The Armada Road Multi-Family District recognizes the importance of having worker housing close to downtown, where the businesses were, where these people most likely would be working.”

The Venezia Park Historic District was really where the upper middle class lived, and the Edgewater District has the highest concentration of 1920s-era homes.

“It’s an area that not too many people in Venice actually even know about, because it’s not on the island, so it doesn’t exist,” Klinkhammer said. “But it has a lot of really more modest homes, not all of them in that Mediterranean Revival style.”

7 During World War II, Venice had a military base

“The air base was used to train mechanics, so they needed people who would be able to work on the planes,” he said.

“The companies that designed or provided the engines for these different planes, they would actually bring their own employees down to train the military personnel on how to maintain and repair these fighters,” Klinkhammer said.

Similar to the show “MASH,” the mechanics would patch up the planes just enough to get them back up in the air, or enough to get them to a better mechanical base for work.

“For those of you familiar, many of the pilots that were in the famous group Flying Tigers that flew in Asia were trained there,” he said.

Toward the end of the war, the base housed 200 German POWs.

6 The only post-secondary education offered in Venice had you clown around to graduate

The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus called Venice its winter home from 1961 to 1991.

In 1968, Irvin Feld created Clown College in Venice. Tuition was free.

“So they would learn the art of putting on their makeup, doing physical comedy, all sorts of things,” he said. “The top graduates actually would be picked up and brought on board to work with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.”

Other graduates still had plenty of opportunities with smaller circuses, or even going to Europe to join circuses.

“The school was here all the way up until 1993, when it moved up to Wisconsin,” he said. “Because, you know, training to be a clown is something you want to do in the cold weather, not necessarily in the sunshine.”

5 A union attempted to build a retirement community

The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers planned Venice as a retirement community for its union members, except that’s not really true.

The BLE, as a union, handled their member’s pensions, but they played around in the stock market a little too much

“They saw the Florida Land Boom as an opportunity to make a quick buck and kind of, you know, recoup their losses from their investments,” he said.

Well, they got into it right when it became the Florida Land Bust. They invested $16 million in the 1920s and they found themselves almost bankrupt.

In 1966, the Amalgamated Transit Union spent $2.5 million to develop land in Venice. It would include 200 homes with amenities for retirees on Curry Creek.

“It was presented to their members at the 1970 convention of the Amalgamated Transit Union, and mysteriously, we never hear anything more again about this retirement community,” he said.

4 Venice was saved from ruin by a military school

The Kentucky Military Institute came to Venice in 1930.

“Their philosophy, though, was the importance of outdoor activity and fresh air doing what their model was, character makes a man,” he said.

Their winter campus on the east coast of Florida was built in the 19th century and it was entirely wood. It burned down.

The school went bankrupt, but the teachers bought it outright and looked for a new winter campus.

Venice had three hotels and infrastructure already in place.

“One building was used for the dining hall and for the dorms for the faculty and for the seniors, and another hotel was used for classrooms and dormitories for the underclassmen, and eventually, the Orange Blossom Garage would be purchased and would serve as both their gymnasium and their armory and shooting range,” Klinkhammer said.

Where Centennial Park is now, the cadets would perform on the parade grounds once a month.

“We would see crowds from as far away as Tampa coming down here to watch them perform,” he said. “They were that popular.”

Klinkhammer said the community loved them, and that the institute did, in a way, save the city by bringing down families, teachers and staff to stay in Venice, spending money.

“It was a real boost to the economy,” he said.

Attendance started to falter as young boys became less interested in war, likely because of the Vietnam War.

“I like to joke that the city was excited to see them come as sad to see them go, except for one demographic, the high school boys — because for three months out of the year, they get their butts kicked in sports and they lost their girlfriends,” he said, laughing.

3 A force of nature moved Venice a couple of miles southwest

That force of nature wasn’t a hurricane or earthquake. It was actually Bertha Palmer.

“She convinced the Seaboard Airline Railroad and the U.S. Post Office to name her property that she was developing south of Roberts Bay, Venice,” he said. “Problem was there was already a Venice on the other side of Roberts Bay.”

Palmer had a lot of money, so they listened to her, and the other Venice was left without a name.

“So she generously offered up to these people the name Potter for their community,” he said. “Named after her deceased husband.”

They loved the name Potter so much, they picked Nokomis instead.

“Nokomis was the grandmother of Hiawatha, and so that’s where I believe the name came from, because it’s probably better than being in a town called Potter,” he said.

2 The John Nolen Plan is not the Bible event

Klinkhammer created the Ten Commandments based off of Nolen’s plan for the City of Venice and it goes as such:

Thou shalt have no other planners before meThou shalt idolize West Venice Avenue from the train depot to the Gulf of MexicoRemember the beaches and keep them free from developmentThou shalt not lay your streets in a grid patternDo not forsake or do not take the stone groves name in vain, even if it is that blank spot on the map that everyone always wonders aboutThou shalt not covet Victorian craftsman or Ozarks architectural stylesHonor your pocket parks for communal gatheringsDo not forsake sidewalksThou shalt not bear adequate parkingThou shalt build a canal around the city

1 The coolest place to learn about Venice is at the Division of Historical Resources

“Now, if you just want to go see much cool stuff and learn much cool history, then you come to the Venice Museum, but if you want to do some serious stuff, you can go to the Archives and Research Center,” Klinkhammer said. “So that is actually the most important thing you need to know about Venice History when you go to your next cocktail party.”