The Brief

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass this week announced that she has secured funding to address some of the effects of the climate crisis, mostly by building more shade structures.

Roughly $93.5 million dollars will be allocated toward addressing extreme heat, with the majority of the funding for building bus shelters. Other money will go toward planting more trees and installing cooling pavement.

Work on installing the shelters will begin early next year.

The funding, said Councilmember Imelda Padilla at a news conference, will help the city add 3,000 more bus shelters and 450 shade structures over 10 years. In Padilla's district, which encompasses the San Fernando Valley, she said they'll focus on building shelters along routes like the 152, 154 and 94.

Temperatures in the San Fernando Valley can rise up to 115 degrees, and “for somebody to be sitting on a bench like this and not have shade is literally dangerous,” Congressman Tony Cardenas told reporters at a news conference.

Funding is coming from:

• $30 million Public Works Trust Fund loan that will go toward Los Angeles’ Sidewalk and Transit Amenities Program (STAP) to install bus shelters and shade structures
• $8 million in Los Angeles City funding also toward STAP 
• $53 million in funding from Metro to construct bus shelters as part of Metro’s North San Fernando Valley Transit Corridor project
• $2.5 million in Federal Community Project Funding that will be used toward shade structures, cooling pavements and other projects designed to bring down the heat on sidewalks

Effects of heat

Madeline Brozen welcomes the funding. As deputy director for the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, her work focuses on the transport needs of vulnerable populations. Through her research, she’s found that only about 23% of bus stops in Los Angeles have shade.

“Extreme heat kills more people than any other natural disaster,” Brozen said. “There's a really important avenue (building bus shelters) by which to address public health and make sure that people feel less of the impacts of climate change.”

Extreme heat, she said, was one of equity as those who are more likely to ride the bus are people of color.

People at risk for the negative effects of extreme heat, she said, live in neighborhoods that have less tree cover and access to air conditioning because of “the way in which kind of the neighborhoods are constructed.”

Barriers to bus shelters

Funding was just one of the barriers to installing bus shelters in the city, Brozen said. There were also “bureaucratic hurdles in terms of the approval process by which new shelters are being added to the system,” as well as how the city’s previous contract was set up to provide bus shelters. The contract, she said, was focused on “producing ad revenue and the city wasn't actually seeing any of that revenue.”

The city’s current contract with Tranzito-Vector, LLC is exciting, she added.

“The city is actually paying the capital costs and that they're getting revenue sharing with the new contractor,” Brozen said. “This is just allowing for the city to have more control of where the bus shelters will go as they're putting in the capital costs.”

Community welcomes the funding 

Jessica Meaney, executive director of Investing in Place, a nonprofit focused on transportation and public works advocacy in Los Angeles, said the funding was long overdue. In 2022, the organization published a report titled, The Bus Stops Here. In it, bus riders across the city, said things that were lacking included “shade, a place to sit, trash picked up, feelings of safety, lighting, kind of the basic things that have been far too long neglected in the city of LA and our public right of way.”

Investing in bus shelters, Meaney said, would also mean bringing them up “to accessible standards so that people with wheelchairs, with strollers and things like that have a safe and easy path to wait for the bus.”

Walking down an alley in Hollywood might not be the typical way to watch a live show, but at the Hotel Café on Cahuenga Boulevard, it’s what music lovers have done for 25 years.

It’s a storied music venue that’s been a home for generations of artists. Even big names cut their teeth here, like Adele, Sara Bareilles and Mumford & Sons. It’s the kind of place that has a line well before anyone gets on stage. Phones are a rarity here, and the audience is so silent you can hang on every note.

This place is closing down in early 2026. But the Hotel Café won’t be gone forever — bucking the normal narrative of closures, it’s shutting down in order to expand.

Let’s dig into what made the small space special.

The Hotel Café’s humble origin

It started out as a bit of a sidequest.

Back in 2000, an idea popped into the minds of screenwriting partners Marko Shafer and Max Mamikunian. Why not open a coffee shop together that could serve as a creative home base?

The two bought a vacant space right below a hotel. The plan was simple: Be successful enough to have a staff and go back to screenwriting. The Hotel Café, as they named it, reached that milestone right before Sept. 11 rattled America — and consumer habits nationwide.

“ We were in that position of just having made our success as a coffee shop and then all of a sudden nothing,” Mamikunian said. “We thought we were going to close down.”

Then musician Gary Jules came in, fresh off the heels of his hit version of “Mad World” in the Donnie Darko movie. He wanted to do a set, which put them on a trajectory no one could have seen coming.

“ The line was down the block, and half of the people in line were musicians,” Mamikunian said.

After his show, the Hotel Café gradually morphed into a regular music venue. Jules stuck around to perform and handle some of the booking, then Shafer took the helm.

Magical nights

The intimate, dimly lit setup quickly drew music agents, crooning fans and audiophiles. In the early days, they’d get inundated with demo CDs (now it’s SoundCloud). Shafer hid sometimes from hopeful performers because the demand was just too much.

Musician James Bay's performance in 2022.

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Justin Higuchi

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The Hotel Café

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A crowd at the Hotel Café in 2022.

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Justin Higuchi

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The Hotel Café

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He and Mamikunian credit the Hotel Café’s following to its consistently curated performance and group showcases, like Songwriter Sunday and Monday Monday. Shafer remembered a time in 2003 when Weezer joined one of those nights.

“ Their manager called me on my Razr flip phone, and so there was no proof it was actually her. I had to take her word for it,” he said.

It was real. Weezer showed up, loaded in some stools and played an acoustic set. Another fond memory, production manager Gia Hughes said, is when Chris Martin’s team called in for a last-minute show. The Coldplay frontman arrived on a Vespa.

“ He’s sound checking ‘The Scientist,’ and it’s just me and the bartender and the sound engineer,” she recalled. “I'm just like, ‘holy sh--, this is unreal.’ It was just one of those super magical nights.”

Hughes said their success also comes from the respectful culture the Hotel Café is known for. It’s as much of a place for music fans as it is for artists. They can sing for a tuned-in audience, or — like Radiohead did — roll up to enjoy a show undisturbed.

A new era

As more and more people came, it was clear the performance space needed more room. They later expanded in 2004 to include the stage next door. Today, they’re in a similar predicament.

A closure date for the Hotel Café hasn't been set yet.

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Gia Hughes

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The Hotel Café

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That’s why they’re moving to a bigger space inside Lumina Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard in the first half of 2027, which they recently announced on Instagram. The new spot will have two stages and a restaurant component.

While many Hotel Café fans are sad to see it move, Mamikunian said it’s another period of reinvention. He’s proud of their time on Cahuenga Boulevard.

“Any business lasting anywhere for 25 years is an accomplishment,” he said. "I think we want to go out in a kind of celebratory way.”

It’s unclear when exactly the Cahuenga spot will close, but they have several farewell performances scheduled through at least the first couple of months in 2026.

“A lot of people are asking us, especially because everybody wants to be one of the last to play the room,” Mamikunian said. “I  think we’ll know within the next few weeks for sure that we can put an actual date on it.”

LACMA’s first Van Gogh isn’t a painting of blue flowers, golden wheat fields or aged faces. It’s of a parked stagecoach, and it’s considered a good example of what made the Dutch painter, and the Impressionist movement he was a part of, so revolutionary.

The painting is called “Tarascon Stagecoach.” It was painted in 1888 and was donated to LACMA earlier this year by the Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation.

It’s LACMA’s first Van Gogh painting, and the encyclopedic museum will be showing it off starting Sunday in a show called “Collecting Impressionism at LACMA” that focuses on 100 works from LACMA’s collection. The works are arranged chronologically to show the evolving tastes that have shaped the museum's collection of Impressionist art.

The museum’s acquisition isn’t just a win for the museum. The museum-going public and the region’s teenage and college-age students also will benefit.

“I very much remember seeing Van Gogh in a rotunda space in the [Philadelphia Museum of Art] and finding it to be just so striking because of these luscious, bright colors,” said Summer Sloane-Britt, who saw her first Van Goh during a middle school visit to the museum.

Sloane-Britt now is a professor of art and art history at Occidental College.

“Visual analysis and seeing objects in person is always so core to historical learning and for studio artists as well,” Sloane-Britt said.

And seeing a Van Gogh in person, Sloane-Britt said, and saying you don’t like it is also OK because that signals the work has led you to identify and assert your own aesthetic tastes in art.

Van Gogh road trip in LA. Shotgun!

The LACMA exhibit presents a good opportunity to get on the road for a four-stop Van Gogh road trip without leaving L.A. County.

Van Gogh's "Irises"

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Courtesy Getty Museum

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You can start at LACMA and see “Tarascon Stagecoach,” benefiting from the context of seeing other impressionist works by Van Gogh’s contemporaries.

Hop over to the Hammer Museum in Westwood, where you’ll see “Hospital at Saint-Rémy,” one of three paintings by Van Gogh in the collection.

Then head west on Wilshire Boulevard to the Getty to see “Irises,” one of the paintings that’s made Van Gogh an art star.

"The Mulberry Tree," a painting by Vincent Van Gogh, on display at the Norton Simon Museum

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Courtesy Norton Simon Museum

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End your Van Gogh road trip by heading east to Pasadena to the Norton Simon Museum. The museum’s smaller, more intimate setting is a good place to see the museum’s six, yes six, Van Gogh paintings.

The exhibit also will feature the newly acquired work "The Artist’s Garden, Vétheuil" by Claude Monet.