The Brief

Orcas are hard to spot in Southern California but not impossible.

They are most active while migrating through our waters in the spring so you may be able to see them in just a few more months.

But there are all kinds of majestic marine mammals near us year-round.

Depending on migration patterns, our coast features blue whales, gray whales, humbacks, minkes, and more. Not to mention dolphins and some of their closer relatives.

Sometimes you can see them from the shoreline or while out surfing, but it’s best to get away further out to sea on a boat. A handful of local companies operate whale watching tours and they handle the tracking for you.

Pro-tip: It can get windy out there so bring a jacket and hold onto your hat! Sunscreen is also a good idea.

Where to Whale Watch In Southern California

• Harbor Breeze, Santa Monica, LA, Long Beach, San Pedro, and Newport Beach
• Newport Landing, Newport Beach
• SoCal Whale Watching, Long Beach
• Capt. Dave’s, Dana Point
• RB Whales, Redondo Beach

The 83rd annual Golden Globe Awards take place Sunday evening beginning at 5 p.m. at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, and that means parking restrictions and street closures in the city.

Here are places to avoid, as well as some alternative routes:

North Santa Monica Boulevard:

• Westbound lane closures: Complete lane closures, from Wilshire Boulevard to Century Park East through 6 a.m. Monday.
  
• Eastbound lane closures: Complete lane closures, from Century Park East to Wilshire Boulevard from 2 p.m. Saturday through 6 a.m. Monday. 

The city suggests using South Santa Monica Boulevard, which will remain open in both directions. There also are alternative east-west routes such as Olympic, Sunset and Pico boulevards.

Wilshire Boulevard:

• Eastbound/Westbound lane reduction: Lane reductions are in effect and will last through 9 p.m. Wednesday.
  
• Eastbound/Westbound full closure: All of Wilshire Boulevard between Comstock Avenue and North Santa Monica Boulevard will be closed from 10 p.m. Saturday through 6 a.m. Monday.
  
• Eastbound lanes of Wilshire Boulevard: An eastbound closure from Comstock to North Santa Monica Boulevard will occur between 10 p.m. Monday through 6 a.m. Tuesday.

Other streets:

Several other streets like Whittier Drive, Carmelita Avenue, Elevado Avenue and Lomitas Avenue, as well as Trenton Drive and adjacent alleys will have limited closures with local access available only to residents. Closures begin at 10 p.m. Saturday and last through 6 a.m. Monday.

Parking notices:

Residential streets surrounding the venue will be completely restricted, no exceptions made, from 6 a.m. Sunday until 6 a.m. Monday on the following streets:

• Whittier Drive — from Wilshire Boulevard to Elevado Avenue
• Carmelita Avenue — from Wilshire Boulevard to Walden Drive
• Elevado Avenue — from Wilshire Boulevard to Walden Drive
• Trenton Drive — from Whittier Drive to Wilshire Boulevard
• Walden Drive — from Santa Monica Boulevard to Elevado Avenue
• Lomitas Avenue — from Wilshire Boulevard to Walden Drive

Residents without permit parking can obtain parking exemptions by contacting the city of Beverly Hills’ parking exemption line at (310) 285-2548 or online at beverlyhills.org/parkingexemptions.

Demonstrations against this week’s deadly ICE shooting in Minneapolis are planned this weekend across Los Angeles. The protests are being organized by the “ICE Out For Good Coalition” — a network of several groups including the ACLU and 50501.

Here are a some of the planned actions across the city:

Saturday

• Pasadena: Noon to 2 p.m. at Garfield and Colorado Boulevard, across from the Paseo Mall
• Eagle Rock: 1 to 2 p.m. at Colorado and Eagle Rock boulevards
• City of Los Angeles: 2 to 4:30 p.m. in Pershing Square

Sunday

• West Hollywood: 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at 647 N. San Vicente Blvd., across from the Pacific Design Center.
• City of Los Angeles: Noon to 2 p.m. at The Home Depot on 2055 N. Figueroa St.
• Beverly Hills: 2 and 4 p.m. at 9439 Santa Monica Blvd., between Beverly and Canon drives

Jennifer Cacicio didn’t set out to move across the country.

Like thousands of others who fled the L.A. fires a year ago this week, Cacicio and her family left their Altadena home thinking they would be gone a night, maybe two.

But in the year since the Eaton Fire erased their house and neighborhood overnight, home has become somewhere entirely new.

Cacicio, a television writer, and her husband and 8-year-old daughter now live nearly 3,000 miles from L.A. — in Cold Spring, a village in New York’s Hudson Valley they’d never visited until this year.

Starting over somewhere completely new, Cacicio said, felt easier than rebuilding their lives in high-cost L.A. with the foothills of Altadena casting a long shadow.

“What we had in Altadena was so wonderful that anywhere else but Altadena feels like you're settling for less,” Cacicio said.

Jennifer Cacicio poses for a photo with her husband Matt Shallenberger and their daughter, Bruna.

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Matt Shallenberger

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Cacicio is part of a growing fire diaspora — Altadenans scattered across the country and the world, searching for versions of the natural beauty and close-knit and artistic community they enjoyed in the San Gabriels.

Cacicio said she knows of three other Altadena families who’ve relocated to the Hudson Valley. Neighborhoods still edge up against the wilderness, but wooded slopes and river cliffs now define the landscape for them where canyons and ridgelines once did.

I also spoke with two other Altadena households who left post-fire, one for the Netherlands and the other for Asheville, North Carolina. Each family described decisions shaped by financial realities and the wrenching calculus of raising young children after a fire.

From Altadena to the Netherlands

The Sporcks left the Netherlands for L.A. over seven years ago, setting off on their American adventure.

Joep, a film composer, saw career opportunities in L.A, and his wife Sarah, was eager to try life in a new country.

Friends in Altadena introduced them to the San Gabriels, and eventually they found their own house in the west part of Altadena near the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Joep composed film scores and trailer music in a converted garage and Sarah commuted to her job as an education specialist at a school in Lincoln Heights. Three years ago, they welcomed their first child.

In the back yard, they planted fruit trees and raised chickens, and hiked along trails to favorite spots like Millard Falls.

“We loved it, and we never meant to leave,” Joep said.

This time last year, Sarah was pregnant with their second son and had just finished her first trimester when on Jan. 7 the couple saw flames shooting from the foothills.

The fire came within several blocks, but their house was ultimately spared.

In the month after the fire, Joep worked to remediate their home alongside professional crews, as Sarah looked after their toddler, whose daycare, Altadena Children’s Center, had burned down.

“With Sarah pregnant, it was really scary, even afterwards,” Joep said.

Added Sarah: “And with a toddler that wants to play outside.”

As they prepared for their second child, the fire forced questions: How long would it take for Altadena to recover and what would that look like?

“I'm sure there will be a new Altadena in a couple of years,” Joep said. “But it felt like it wasn't going to be the same ever again.”

Once-vague thoughts moved to the foreground. In the Netherlands, they would have more family support and a stronger social safety net, like lower-cost childcare.

And Joep had reached a point in his career that he could work remotely.

This past summer, after their baby was born, a listing landed in Joep’s inbox for a three-story brick villa in the southern part of the Netherlands where Joep is from — hilly just like Altadena. The couple made an offer for the house in Epen without seeing it in person.

The Sporcks have moved back to the Netherlands, to the village of Epen in the southern part of the country.

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Gerlach Delissen

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“We made some lists like pros and cons of staying or leaving, and it was just we couldn't deny it anymore,” Joep said.

They put their house on the market — and after some price cuts — sold it to another Altadena family that had lost their home in the fire.

In November, the Sporcks moved to their Epen home, where they are still unpacking — and grieving.

“I’m really sad to be leaving America and Los Angeles,” Joep said. “It feels a little bit like giving up this dream.”

But he said the ties to the area are strong. Their children are dual-citizens. Joep will return to L.A. regularly for work.

“Part of us is now like American, Altadenan forever, I guess,” Joep said.

It's something, he said, that will always set them apart from their friends and family in the Netherlands.

From Eaton Canyon to the Blue Ridge Mountains

Altadena wasn’t their first stop in Southern California. There was Sherman Oaks and Highland Park.

But for Carson Dougherty and Chris Gower, their Altadena cottage rental within walking distance of Eaton Canyon was the first place that felt like home in L.A.

Pushing their daughters in strollers to Altadena Beverage and Market and Prime Pizza, they would stop to speak with neighbors along the way.

“I would walk around and just be like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe we live here,'" Carson said. “I've just never loved a place more or felt more welcome.”

Carson, a spiritual coach, had moved from New York to L.A. about nine years ago when she was an actor, accompanied by Chris who works in tech sales.

Carson is originally from northern Virginia, while Chris grew up in Surrey, England. The call of family always beckoned, but the allure of life in Altadena kept it at bay.

Carson Dougherty and her family moved to Asheville, North Carolina.

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Courtesy Carson Dougherty

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They had months earlier re-upped their lease for another two years, when the Eaton Fire happened.

The next day, they returned to find their rental standing — but coated in soot.

With no clear remediation plan being offered by the landlord and worried about their children’s health, the couple broke their lease and forfeited their full deposit.

As they planned their next move, Carson and Chris began rethinking what it meant to raise a family in California — from pre-school to housing.

“Life here is very hard,” Carson said. “We're obsessed with it, but it's not easy.”

Carson flew with the girls out to Virginia, and stayed with her parents. When Chris rejoined them, they discussed where they could live.

Using A.I., they researched cities within 500 miles of Carson’s parents that met their criteria for schools and property taxes. Starting with more than 50 places, Carson winnowed down the list by watching online walking tours of cities and asking for advice on social media.

Asheville, North Carolina — where she had once attended a wedding — kept coming up.

“But we were like, ‘We're not going to move to a place that just had a hurricane,” Carson said, recalling the devastation of Hurricane Helene in 2024.

After taking road trips to Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey and feeling nothing was clicking, the couple traveled to Asheville. They were drawn to the Blue Ridge Mountains that ring the city and the artistic community that reminded them of Altadena’s.

“I was like, ‘OK, this is it,’” Carson said. “I don't know. It was just a feeling.”

Two months into living in their current spot in Asheville, they’re still adjusting.

“I can see this was the right move for us,” Carson said. “But it doesn't feel like home yet.”

“It still feels like a consolation prize,” Chris said. “Whereas Altadena was the one that we were like ‘Holy crap, we found it.'"

Giving her daughter home

In Cold Spring, New York, Jennifer Cacicio is also going through a range of emotions.

“I love Altadena so much, and there's so much grief in letting go of it,” she said.

She mourns her street of identical mid-century homes designed by the architect Gregory Ain. When neighborhood kids visited each other, they knew the exact layout of each others’ homes.

Jennifer estimates of the 28 houses in the neighborhood, about three-quarters are gone.

After struggling with the cost of renting or buying in L.A., she and her husband — a landscape photographer — began thinking about moving East, where she’s from.

During their daughter’s spring break, the family flew out for an expedition.

“We tried to frame it with my daughter, like, ‘You know what this terrible thing happened, and we're going to try to turn it into a family adventure and live closer to cousins and explore a new part of the world,'" Jennifer said.

Jennifer Cacicio's 8-year-old daughter surveys her new environs in Cold Spring, N.Y.

They looked at towns within an hour or so of New York City, located in the suburbs of New York and Connecticut. In New York’s Hudson Valley, they visited an open house for a school that their daughter instantly took a shine to.

“We were like, ‘Great, let's just build it around that — like one thing felt right,’” Cacicio said.

Another sign came when Jennifer, who was the showrunner for this year’s Paramount+ drama Happy Face, got an offer to work on a show based in New York.

“It kind of felt like the universe confirming the decision in a way,” Jennifer said.

In September, they moved into their new home in Cold Spring. Cacicio puts aside her sadness when she thinks about her daughter.

After an event as traumatic as a fire, she wants her childhood to feel stable again. Altadena will recover over the next decade, Cacicio said, but later than she would hope for her daughter.

Being in a new place has brought unknowns, but also a sense of excitement.

"That was kind of what it came down to," Cacicio said. "It didn't feel like settling. It just felt different."

Los Angeles lost a piece of history when the Hollywood Center Motel burned down earlier this week.

The vacant property on Sunset Boulevard had a reputation as a sleazy, dilapidated inn, but the Hollywood Center Motel actually had multiple previous lives.

The building, one of the oldest in the neighborhood, was from a time before urbanization. It was also nominated for historic protection, in part because of its first era as a house.

A symbol of early Hollywood

Before the fire, the Hollywood Center Motel had seven buildings, a kidney-shaped pool, and a mid-century modern breeze block wall with a neon sign.

But the motel property actually started out as a three-story, Shingle-style home built in 1905, which is an American take on Victorian design known for broad gables.

That was built when Hollywood was an independent city, before it joined the city of L.A. Brian Curran, who co-chairs Hollywood Heritage’s preservation committee, says that during this period, Hollywood was known as a place for retirees to settle down.

“ [It was] marketed as a dry town,” he said. “So it was like, come in, retire among the orange groves and just enjoy life in sunny California.”

The Hollywood Center Motel in 1985.

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Ed Ruscha

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Courtesy Hollywood Heritage

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Hollywood was also changing from agricultural to real estate haven. If you were very well off, you’d live in a lavish Hollywood Hills estate, like Wattles Mansion. If you were more moderate, you’d live in the flat areas to the south, in upper-middle class homes just like the Shingle home.

Changing with the times

The home was first owned by William and Sarah Avery, according to Hollywood Heritage’s nomination petition, who called the home “El Nido” (the nest). They didn’t live there long, but the couple’s luncheon made it into the local paper.

The home changed hands multiple times. When Edmund Schultz, a retired drugstore owner, and his family bought the property in 1921, they decided to turn it into an old English bungalow court with over a dozen units around the main home. This was part of a shift in Hollywood to create low-scale apartments as people flocked to Southern California, according to city records.

“It physically evolved with the evolution of Hollywood,” Curran said, “but also tells a story about the economic and cultural evolution of Hollywood.”

The motel conversion didn’t happen until the mid-1950s, when a different owner enclosed the front porch and divided rooms. It was put up for auction as a 23-unit motel, with a full apartment and family-style spaces.

The Hollywood Center Motel opened shortly after in 1956. As TV’s popularity grew, it quickly became a backdrop for crime dramas. It’s been a filming location for Perry Mason, The Rockford Files, T.J. Hooker and L.A. Confidential. As the decades passed, its run-down appearance worked even better for those who wanted a seedy setting.

A still of the motel in the TV cop drama "T.J. Hooker." The episode, titled "Sweet Sixteen...and Dead," aired in February 1983.

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Screenshot via Tubi

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The damaged neon sign in 2024.

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Darya Sannikova

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Pexels

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The music industry also got a piece of it. In the 70s, musician Neil Young stayed there because he wanted to sleep in the “sleaziest motel” on Sunset Boulevard.

This was the Hollywood Center Motel’s life for decades — a little bit of stardom while it slowly deteriorated. In 2015, the breeze block was damaged in a car crash and not repaired, according to the nomination petition. The motel stopped operating three years later.

What the fire means for historic status

Only a handful of buildings in Hollywood have this kind of history, which is why Curran says they began fighting for it to be protected once it became vacant last year.

The site was eligible for local and state historic status. The city of L.A.’s Cultural Heritage Commission had just voted a few weeks ago to consider that.

But they couldn’t stay ahead of issues. The home was vandalized. A small blaze broke out on the second floor in September. Another fire damaged one of the bungalows the following month.

The home was demolished in the process of stopping the flames.

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Courtesy Hollywood Heritage

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Curran says losing the home in this last fire— the most significant element of the complex — makes the nomination process more challenging, but they’re still pushing for it. He wants protections for the neon sign and breeze block wall. Moving forward, Curran says Hollywood Heritage  will be talking with policymakers about preventing other important sites from the same fate.

“ We know from experience that when you don’t use a building, when there aren’t people inside, they are vulnerable and then they burn,” Curran said. “ We need to do something because this continues to happen.”