So Kinney, an asthmatic, improvised with a side trip to a Southern California health resort, the Sierra Madre Villa Hotel.

There he developed an agency to protect the forests of the San Gabriel Mountains, where ranchers typically set fires to clear land for livestock grazing, but then, as a result, subsequent rainfalls led to flooding in the valleys.

Aided by his friend naturalist John Muir, Kinney established the San Gabriel Timberland Reserve in December 1892, forerunner to the Angeles National Forest.

In 1883, Kinney and Helen Hunt Jackson co-wrote a report for the U.S. Department of the Interior on the condition of California Mission Indians.

[3] This report and others led to the Mission Indian Act of 1891, which created a commission to seek to establish or confirm reservations in Southern California.

[4][5] In 1887, Kinney established the nation's first forestry station in Rustic Canyon on 6 acres (24,000 m2) of land donated by Santa Monica co-founder John P. Jones (also a U.S.

In 1891, Kinney and his partner, Francis Ryan, bought a controlling interest in Pacific Ocean Casino and a tract of land 1.5 miles (2.4 km) long and 1,000 feet (300 m) wide along the Santa Monica beach.

Ryan died in 1898, and his widow's new husband, Thomas Dudley, sold their half interest to a group of men (Fraser, Gage and Merritt Jones) not to Kinney's liking.

By mid-January 1906, an area was built along the edge of the Grand Lagoon patterned after the amusement thoroughfares of the great 19th and 20th century expositions.

There were ornate Venetian-style businesses and a full-sized amusement pier with an ocean aquarium featuring a seal and marine life.

Kinney and some of the nearby residents were aghast at some of the low-class shows that Venice began to offer, but it was considered the best collection of amusement devices on the Pacific Coast, and made a significant profit.

Named Kinney Heights, the development attracted mostly upper-middle-class families who built large Craftsman homes, many of which still stand.

Abbot's adopted son, Thornton Parillo, left a government position and moved to New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he wrote stories and books on his father's experience in Southern California.

In the urban fantasy / alternate history novel, California Bones (Tor Books, June 2014), by Greg van Eekhout, Abbot Kinney's Venetian experiment grew to encompass all of Los Angeles, taking the place of what might otherwise have become L.A.'s metropolitan roads, becoming part of a hydraulic empire overseen by an immortal William Mulholland.