Who Takes the Space Under Venice's Ballerina Clown?

Walk south on Main Street toward Rose Avenue and the first thing you see isn't the storefront. It's thirty feet of aluminum and fiberglass standing on one leg above the sidewalk, a red-nosed clown's head sitting on a ballerina's body in a blue tutu, watching over an intersection it has claimed since before most of the businesses on this block existed. Right now, the space directly beneath it is empty. The CVS that operated there closed its doors on July 1, and as of this month nobody has announced what comes next.

That gap is the actual story here, though not for the reason most passersby assume. People keep asking who's going to move into the old pharmacy space. The better question is why nobody ever asks who's going to take down the clown.

The Sculpture Was Built to Get Attention. It Still Does.

The piece is formally titled Ballerina Clown, though almost everyone in Venice just calls it Clownerina. Developer Harlan Lee commissioned it in 1989 for the Venice Renaissance building, a four-story, 66-unit condominium complex at Rose and Main designed by Johannes Van Tilburg & Partners. Lee reportedly wanted something that would make the building impossible to miss, and he had grown up in Venice watching circus clowns on the boardwalk, which is where the concept came from.

Artist Jonathan Borofsky wasn't starting from scratch. A smaller version of the same figure had already been exhibited at MOCA, where it performed a mechanized rendition of Sinatra's "My Way." When the full-scale version went up on Lee's building, an LA Times art critic compared it to work by Picasso and Seurat, which is a strange sentence to write about a pharmacy storefront but accurately captures how seriously the piece was taken from day one.

A few specifics worth knowing if you've only ever glanced up at it in passing:

• Height: 30 feet, mounted above the entrance on a raised platform
• Materials: aluminum, steel, wire mesh, and painted fiberglass, with an electric motor built into the right knee
• Installed: 1989, as part of the original Venice Renaissance construction
• Formal name: Ballerina Clown. Local name: Clownerina.

None of that has changed in 37 years. The businesses underneath it have changed constantly.

The Leg Went Quiet for 24 Years

The motor in that right knee was designed to make the figure perform a slow kick, a callback to the street performers Borofsky was riffing on. It worked when the building opened, and then it stopped almost immediately. Residents living in the condos above the storefront complained that the mechanism was loud, and the building shut it off in 1990.

For the next 24 years, Clownerina stood frozen on one leg, mid-pose but motionless, while tenants moved in and out of the retail space below. The motor wasn't restored until 2014, and once it came back online, the building set a schedule: the leg kicks daily between 1 and 6 p.m.

That timeline tells you something the sculpture's fame usually obscures. The people who live closest to it, in the units directly above, were the ones who wanted it silenced. It took a quarter century and pressure from the wider neighborhood to bring the kick back. The statue's status as a landmark was never really about the building it sits on. It was about everyone else's attachment to the corner.

The Ground Floor Turns Over. The Roofline Doesn't.

Before CVS, the retail space below the sculpture operated as a Koo Koo Roo. Long-time residents don't agree on exactly when CVS moved in after that, only that at some point it did, and it stayed long enough that most people in Venice can't picture that corner without a pharmacy sign under the clown's feet.

Now that sign is gone. CVS confirmed the closure to local outlets in May, and staff told reporters the pharmacy would shut on July 1, with prescriptions transferring to a Westside location at 119 S. Lincoln Boulevard. A store manager told Yo! Venice the closure "has nothing to do with the statue." Nationally, CVS has pointed to factors like local market dynamics, shifting population patterns, and store density when explaining closures across its footprint, though no location-specific reason for this particular store has been made public.

Par Commercial Brokerage handles the ground-level commercial space at Venice Renaissance, and as of the most recent local coverage in mid-September, the corner remains vacant with no new tenant announced. That means the space has now cycled through at least two identifiable occupants in the decades since 1989, plus whatever eventually fills it next. The sculpture on the roofline has had exactly one occupant this entire time: itself.

What Fills an Empty Storefront on One of Venice's Busiest Corners

Rose Avenue itself is a useful comparison a few blocks away. The Rose, a restaurant that had operated near Rose and Main since 1979, permanently closed in December 2024 after 45 years in business, following a major renovation back in 2015. That's a business with more institutional weight on this stretch than almost anything else, and it still closed. Newer names like Venice Beach Wines and Superba Snack Bar have taken other storefronts along Rose in the years since, proof that the corridor keeps absorbing turnover without losing its identity.

Seen against that pattern, the empty CVS space isn't an anomaly for the neighborhood. Ground-floor retail on this stretch changes hands regularly. What makes this particular vacancy stand out is simply what's mounted above it. A closed sandwich shop on Rose draws a shrug. A closed pharmacy under a 30-foot ballerina clown draws headlines.

Nobody currently knows what's leasing that space next. What we do know is that whatever moves in will be doing business under the same fixture that watched Koo Koo Roo leave, watched CVS arrive, watched its own leg get shut off for 24 years and then switched back on, and is still standing there mid-kick every afternoon between 1 and 6 while the storefront beneath it sits dark. The clown was never really the tenant of that building. It's closer to the landlord.

If you're the kind of person who notices which storefronts change and which fixtures stay put, that habit tells you something about how neighborhoods actually hold their character over time. It's the same instinct that matters when you're trying to understand a block before you buy into it, or figure out what a changing storefront means for a property nearby. If you're watching Venice for reasons that go beyond curiosity about a clown, Brooke Bryant knows this corner and the ones around it. Let's Connect.