Jim Heimann Sins of the City: The Real Los Angeles Noir, Chronicle Books: San Francisco, CA, 1999, 159 pp., 1940s
" . . . After the war, . . .
" . . . beach front communities including Long Beach, Venice, and Santa Monica hosted "games of chance" that were just another form of illegal lottery. Bridge, keno, tango, and bingo parlors were everywhere. The thinly veiled gambling dens fed small-time bunco artists for a short period after the war but were slowly eliminated by the mid-fifties." p. 10
" . . .
p. 32 [Caption: "Exhibitionism and body worship. Hedonist pursuits practiced in earnest at Muscle Beach in nearby Santa Monica, a suburb favored as a location by fiction writers." Jim Heimann Collection photograph of a bodybuilder, flexing in front of the platform's equipment locker which has been inscribed Phil B. and Bill R., with Frosty Cup, Leo's Place, Burgers behind the platform.]"
pp. 146, 147 ["The Venice Pier pulled in crowds of revelers looking for inexpensive excitement. Writers of the noir found it the perfect locale for fog-shrouded intrigue, ca. 1940. Top another front for penny-ante crime, mechanical horse races were shut down when investigators exposed their fixed wirings. Bottom."Bridgo parlors with exotic names such as Carneo, Vogue, Shamrock, and Canasto were a variation of the same old con game that kept popping up in beachfront amusement zones. The "sucker games" were wiped out in Venice in a clampdown of the racket in 1949."]