Abbot Kinney Festival

Posted October 3rd, 2008 by Meg

Last Sunday my boyfriend and I stopped by the free Abbot Kinney Festival. I always thought that this part of Venice was a safe, trendy, hippy-wonderland; Little did we know that hours later this festival would tragically become gang related murdering grounds.

The event began in 1984, as an annual celebration of the diversity of Venice and homage to it’s founder Abbot Kinney, a tobacco millionaire who founded Venice in 1905. The event extends from Venice Blvd all the way up to Main Street, and also includes some side streets, bringing in about 150,000 hip, attractive people. Supposedly, there was a name change this year to Abbot Kinney Community Association in order to better reflect it’s goals. In my opinion, that doesn’t sound as much fun as the word ‘festival.’ But hey, I get it.

With a very low budget, we bought some tri-tip sandwiches and walked around looking at cool stuff. One cool tent/table we found was the I Heart Guts company. I was so in love with the stand that I forgot take a picture of their cute plush toys, but I want make sure the five people who read this blog, know about this place. It was created in 2005 by some amazing illustrator girl (power!) who just likes organs. (Mistakenly, I thought it was a guy that made these. But, now that I have found out the truth that a woman is the genius behind this, I like the guts even more!). I fell in love with the spleen plush toy and wanted to purchase it for my friend who unfortunately had to have her spleen removed two years ago. Sadly, the spleen is not up for sale, but will be soon! I really liked their t-shirts too, especially this one:

So check out their fun website. Buy something. For me. And enjoy!

Here are random pictures of the Festival (the NRA stand really stood out to me as strange and that is why I am putting it up here, imagine seeing this table next to green tables, Obama tables, hippy tables, etc. It just sort of seemed out of place.):