Intracoastal Waterway
The Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) split Venice into two sections when it was completed back in the 1960s. The island portion of the city was west of the ICW. To get downtown or anywhere else on the island, you had to cross one of three drawbridges over the ICW. This is my nephew Scott out front of my parents’ apartment on Venice Avenue. The Venice Avenue drawbridge is visible in the background.
AS EARLY AS 1926, there were plans for a waterway that would run through Venice along the seaboard, some 500 feet inland. A party was held in the Hotel Venice (now Park Place) to celebrate the plan. Within a year, the land boom had turned into a bust and the waterway was not built. In 1939, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed a waterway but again, not a spoonful of dirt was moved. The Corps had taken its first step to this goal in 1936 when it created the jetties.Eight years later, May 26, 1947, the West Coast Inland Navigation District (WCIND), the taxing district which would fund and maintain the Intracoastal, was created. Taxes would be collected from property owners in Sarasota, Pinellas, Hillsborough, Manatee, Charlotte and Lee counties. The planned site of the Intracoastal was moved twice, first to the area around Park Boulevard and then finally to the site where it finally was built from 1963-66. The moves were necessitated by growth spurts in Venice. When originally planned in 1939, the population was 600. By the early ‘60s, when the waterway was finally built, that number had jumped to 6,000.
Unchanged was the plan to dredge from the Venice Inlets east to Dona Bay, southeast through Roberts Bay to U.S. 41 where the highway crosses Hatchett Creek. That was the site of Ben Dunn’s Fisherman’s Wharf which is still there today.
Venice resident Robert Baynard proposed that the channel be 100-feet wide with a nine-foot draw and a 300-foot turning basin. That width and depth were specified when the project finally began roughly along the line of the Seaboard railway line in Venice.
After a favorable vote by city council on Oct. 31, 1962, contracts were let. Council member Blanche Celli abstained and council member John Hogan voted against the waterway. In 1963, construction began on the 148-mile section from Fort Myers to Tarpon Springs, including the Venice section, that would complete the 2,700-mile Intracoastal Waterway that runs from Maine to Texas. The waterway was designed by the Corps of Engineers to provide a “protected route for pleasure and commercial boats and barge traffic, with lateral canals connecting the waterway with inland industrial centers.” Its final cost was $13.5 million; more than 14 million cubic yards of sand and rock were dredged.
The formal dedication of the massive project took place February 25, 1967. It was marked with a parade of boats on the waterway and a parade of floats and other vehicles on Venice Avenue.
