Google vs. Arnold at Venice Beach, California

**hifrommike65** · 06-20-2012, 04:37 AM

^{June 19, 2012

THE NEW YORK TIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/20/us...ursion.html?hp

(see link for a multimedia slide show of pix with Arnold in Venice Beach)

Venice Beach Bodybuilders Fear Google

Is Kicking Sand at Them

By ADAM NAGOURNEY and IAN LOVETT

LOS ANGELES — This city’s boardwalk community of

Venice has long celebrated its seediness, accepting — embracing, really — the

kind of sensory assaults that would faze more conventional places: beachfront

bodybuilders, ragamuffin street vendors, tattoo artists, Hare Krishna chanters,

skateboarders, drug dealers, gangs, homeless encampments, rowdy tourists, film

crews and, more recently, a colony of medical marijuana

dispensaries.

But Venice might have met its match in what many see

as its most unsettling threat yet: Google.

“As soon as I walked in, they said: ‘You heard about

Google? Why don’t you have your staff look into this?’ ” former Gov. Arnold

Schwarzenegger, who began his professional career as a bodybuilder here 44

years ago, said after he emerged from a throng of worried muscle-bound admirers

at Gold’s Gym. “It’s this conspiracy theory: ‘Google is coming! They are going

to take over and wipe out our bodybuilding.’ ”

In November, Google moved an army of sales and

technology employees into 100,000 square feet in two Venice buildings. It is

negotiating leases on another 100,000 square feet, according to real estate

agents. That includes the 31,000-square-foot expanse that is Gold’s Gym, the

very bodybuilding symbol of Venice, if not the universe, where Mr.

Schwarzenegger stopped by the other morning.

No matter that Google officials said they had no plans

to displace the fabled gym. Although a spokesman, Jordan Newman, said, “We’re

not taking over Gold’s,” the company’s reluctance to talk about its long-term

ambition for Venice, or why it would want anything to do with the Gold’s

building, has stirred a storm of speculation and anxiety.

“They’ll buy it, they’ll kick us out, and we’ll have

to relocate,” said Jerry Martin, a bodybuilder standing in front of the gym.

Nathanial Moon, bulging with muscles, called it “the

ultimate revenge of the nerds, the greatest way of getting back at all the guys

that stuffed people from Google into lockers from high school and stole all

their prom dates. And you can’t fight against Google, because they’ve got

billions of dollars.”

“But,” he added, “I love their search engine.”

People are even beginning to refer to Venice — the

Venice of movies, surfing and Muscle Beach — as Silicon Beach. That may sound

like progress to some, but not to those along the boardwalk, where a synagogue

shares the same strip of sidewalk with a freak show advertising a two-headed

turtle.

“I don’t want to see Venice look like Santa Monica,”

said DeAlphria Tarver, 26, who was selling handmade hats on a boardwalk crammed

with vendors, stragglers and skateboarders as homeless people slept on the

adjacent grass. Google, she said, will “want it to look a lot more polished, and

not hippielike.”

Mr. Schwarzenegger said that the community was

“freaking out” and that he appreciated why. “Google has bought everything in

Venice that is available,” said the former governor, who has been buying and

selling buildings here for close to 30 years.

But he welcomes Google as a neighbor and said the

fears that it would turn Venice into a sanitized Silicon Valley on the Pacific

were exaggerated. “This is the mecca of bodybuilding,” he said. “They will never

leave.”

Mr. Schwarzenegger may well be Venice’s biggest fan,

as he demonstrated during a two-hour tour of the place he came to as an aspiring

bodybuilder and where he still keeps his office. Unabashedly nostalgic, he

pointed out the fading remains of the sign on an old Gold’s Gym building; the

wall outside the onetime home of Rudolph Valentino that he built as a

bricklayer; and the outdoor gym at Muscle Beach, where he happily posed for

pictures. (“Excuse me, are you the Terminator?” one boy asked nervously.)

Even as governor, Mr. Schwarzenegger preferred to

greet out-of-town visitors at his private office, arguing that Venice presented

a better face of California than, say, Sacramento. And most weekends, when he is

not acting in movies, he comes here from his Brentwood estate for a bicycle ride

down the boardwalk. Or tries to.

“There are days when we can’t get through,” he said.

“It’s wild, because the homeless wake up in the morning when you get there. They

are there with their bags. They are coming out of holes and places. And you

smell the incense. The touch of the ’60s is all there, and all the street

vendors are coming out.”

“This place is insane,” he said. “You never have to

smoke a joint in Venice. You just go on a bicycle ride in the morning, you just

inhale, and you live off everyone else.”

He stopped to point out where he and Jack LaLanne had

worked out, as what could have been a younger version of the governor whacked a

punching bag by the beach. “You can see the way it’s built up,” he said. “The

grass. The bathrooms. None of that was here. Some people think it’s lost

personality. I don’t think it’s lost personality.”

Venice today is hardly like the community Mr.

Schwarzenegger found when he first arrived, drawn by a promise of “nice

buildings and hotels, kind of like a French Riviera type of look,” he said. “But

when I got here, it was totally like a dump. It was dreadful.”

As recently as early 2006, it was still regarded as

dangerous. Drug dealers could be found at all hours at Oakwood Park. Prostitutes

roamed the surrounding streets wearing bright-red heels and leopard-print

miniskirts. Crack cocaine addicts, their faces welted with sores, staggered

along sidewalks that were broken or littered with trash.

But a crackdown by the Los Angeles Police Department

helped transform Venice, as officers aided by helicopters swept out drug dealers

and gangs. Abbot Kinney Boulevard, once just another forlorn Venice street, was

named “The

Coolest Block in America” by GQ magazine in its Style Bible this spring.

There are plans to build a 720-foot-long zip line over the boardwalk.

Mr. Newman said Google had no desire to pick a fight

with the bodybuilders. But the bodybuilders were not buying that. “If you don’t

want the building, leave it alone,” said Big Will Harris.

In truth, Google may not be the only culprit here. The

old World Gym at the top of Abbot Kinney, the place that was Mr.

Schwarzenegger’s gym, has been bought. World’s is gone, and the space is being

transformed into high-end shops and offices. The new owner and future tenant?

Arnold Schwarzenegger.}

**Waylon** · 06-20-2012, 04:44 AM

BOOM!

**Waylon** · 06-20-2012, 04:49 AM

**hifrommike65** · 06-20-2012, 07:42 AM

First Time Big Will Harris has ever been quoted by the NY Times!

**HeavyDutyGuy** · 06-20-2012, 11:10 AM

Originally Posted by hifrommike65

First Time Big Will Harris has ever been quoted by the NY Times!

It was only a matter of time..

**Waylon** · 06-20-2012, 12:25 PM

Originally Posted by HeavyDutyGuy

It was only a matter of time..

Well he's had over 600 years to do it...

**Waylon** · 06-20-2012, 12:56 PM

^{"In truth, Google may not be the only culprit here. The

old World Gym at the top of Abbot Kinney, the place that was Mr.

Schwarzenegger’s gym, has been bought. World’s is gone, and the space is being

transformed into high-end shops and offices. The new owner and future tenant?

Arnold Schwarzenegger. "

Lol I'v seen People who said Worlds was just as Iconic as the New Golds Venice, Irony... get it, iron.}