24/7 Trauma & Biohazard Cleanup Near Venice Beach Venice, FL

Venice got its name in 1888, when settler Frank Higel established a post office and named the community after Venice, Italy - before that, fishermen knew the spot as Horse and Chaise, after a cluster of trees that looked like a horse and carriage.

Venice is one of America's earliest master-planned cities - in 1925 surgeon Dr. Fred H. Albee hired the famed planner John Nolen to design it, and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers built it out with northern Italian architecture; it is considered the most complete example of Nolen's garden-city vision in Florida.

Venice was incorporated as a town on July 1, 1926, and then as a city on May 9, 1927, in the middle of the Florida land boom.

Venice calls itself the Shark's Tooth Capital of the World, because fossilized shark's teeth wash up in unusual abundance on its Gulf beaches, a claim it celebrates with an annual Shark's Tooth Festival.

Venice had a population of 25,463 at the 2020 census, up from 20,748 in 2010, and the Census Bureau estimated it had already grown to about 30,477 by 2025.

Venice has about 15,027 households, but they average only 1.76 people each and roughly 80% are owner-occupied - a small-household profile that reflects the city's popularity with retirees; the median owner-occupied home value is about $434,700.

In the early 1960s the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus made Venice its winter headquarters, bringing circus families and performers to the little Gulf city each off-season.

Venice survived the Great Depression partly because the Kentucky Military Institute made it the school's winter home in the 1930s, followed by the Venice Army Air Base during World War II.