Could you find a better walk from downtown Venice to its beach than Heritage Park? It’s a John Nolen vision that didn’t have a chance to materialize before the city’s developers went bankrupt in 1927.
The site was left to the imagination of succeeding generations to give it name and purpose.
Nolen designed West Venice Avenue, including its median, to be a span of 120 feet wide. The median was a flat piece of sand with date palm trees on each side between the east/west lanes.
It was originally designed with a narrow, arrow-straight “bridle path” down its middle, which stretched from the beach to current day City Hall.
The median didn’t have a name in Nolen’s Venice plan when it was commissioned by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. However, Nolen had given it a name a year earlier when he did his first Venice design for Dr. Fred Albee.
The name was Almeda Park. The name in Spanish means “a shady public promenade.”
John Nolen’s landscape architect, Prentiss-French, arrived in Venice in January 1926, and by May, he had transplanted full-grown orange trees from another location to the median in downtown Venice.