Two announcements landed on Laguna Beach bulletin boards within the same three-week stretch this September, and on the surface they look unrelated. A surf museum that spent twenty years bouncing between Costa Mesa and San Clemente finally came home to a permanent building on Broadway. A twenty-one-year-old food festival that fills the Festival of Arts grounds every October got canceled with four weeks' notice. One is a homecoming. One is a hole in the calendar. Together, they show how real estate can shape Laguna Beach's event calendar.
The reunion nobody expected to close out this year
The Surfing Heritage and Culture Center opened its grand opening weekend on Friday, September 18, at 239 Broadway, a block from Main Beach. The building itself has history. It went up in 1941 as a Sprouse Reitz five-and-dime, later became Laguna Drugs, and now holds roughly 12,000 square feet split between exhibit space on the ground floor and offices and archives upstairs. The Duda family, which owns the property, worked with the museum to make the move happen, a gesture museum co-chair Mark Christy called a recognition of what SHACC means to Laguna and to Orange County surf history.
The homecoming framing is literal. SHACC started in a second-floor apartment in downtown Laguna Beach more than two decades ago, when founder Dick Metz and curator Barry Haun shared a walk-in closet as an office. The collection outgrew that space, moved to an industrial warehouse in Costa Mesa, then to a building in San Clemente. Executive director Jeff Alter, son of surfboard shaper Hobie Alter, told The Inertia the new Broadway address is what the organization actually needed: public-facing, on a retail street, not tucked into an industrial park.
The weekend itself ran like a proper civic event. Friday opened with a ribbon-cutting led by Dick Metz at 2 p.m., followed by a traditional Hawaiian blessing, before doors opened to the public through 7 p.m. Saturday brought a free, open house style event for all ages. Sunday closed the weekend with a Grand Opening Fundraising Gala featuring live music from surfer and musician Donavon Frankenreiter, plus tributes and a live and silent auction. Going forward, SHACC's posted hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., with free general admission to the main gallery.
For a resident, the practical note is simple: there's now a free, walkable museum a block off Main Beach, open most of the week, holding what its own board has described as the most complete surf history archive anywhere.
The empty Thursday in October
According to Best of Laguna Beach, the Laguna Beach Chamber of Commerce canceled the 21st annual Taste of Laguna, originally scheduled for Thursday, October 1, at the Festival of Arts grounds. Chamber President and CEO Brittany Ganson said an unresolved alcohol licensing issue tied to Laguna Beach Company, the entity controlled by local businessman Mohammad Honarkar, made it impossible to produce the event as planned. Ganson said she learned about the problem roughly eight days before the announcement, spent the following days searching for a workaround, and brought the matter to the Chamber board on Monday, August 31. After what was described as lengthy deliberation, the board voted to cancel.
The licensing problem didn't appear out of nowhere. It sits downstream of a separate legal fight between the Festival of Arts and Terra Laguna Beach, the restaurant on the Festival grounds that Honarkar controls. The Festival filed an eviction action against Terra back in February. Following a bench trial, Orange County Superior Court Judge Jennifer McCartney ruled in Terra's favor, finding that the Festival had never actually restored possession of the restaurant space, which meant the rent obligation the eviction was based on had never kicked in. Because Terra wasn't operating for the Festival's own 2026 summer season, the grounds ran food and alcohol service through a temporary setup called Courtside Kitchen on the neighboring tennis courts instead.
That's the tangle Taste of Laguna walked into. The event depends on alcohol service on the Festival grounds, and the grounds' liquor arrangement is currently caught inside active litigation that hasn't fully resolved. Last year's Taste drew 38 restaurants, 35 additional vendors, and about 75 volunteers. In 2024, more than 950 tickets sold, including roughly 300 VIP tickets that sold out entirely. A former Chamber CEO once put the event's importance in blunt terms: Taste of Laguna represents close to a third of the Chamber's annual operating budget, with a fundraising target north of $100,000. Losing it for a year isn't a scheduling footnote for the Chamber. It's a budget problem.
Two venues, two different outcomes
Line these two stories up and the contrast becomes clear. SHACC's opening didn't depend on the Festival of Arts grounds, on a liquor license, or on anyone else's lease. It happened in a privately owned building on a public street, with the Duda family working with the museum to make the move happen. Taste of Laguna depended entirely on alcohol service inside a venue whose licensing status is currently entangled in a dispute between two other parties.
That's the actual lesson of Laguna Beach's fall reshuffle. Events that depend on the Festival of Arts grounds can be affected by the venue's current licensing situation. The events built around independent nonprofits, public land, or a Rotary Club parking lot are not. It's not a comment on any one business or person. It's a structural fact about how this town's calendar is put together, and this fall is the clearest illustration of it in years.
The fall calendar, as it actually stands
| Date | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Sept. 18 to 20 | SHACC Grand Opening Weekend | 239 Broadway |
| Sept. 26 | National Public Lands Day with Laguna Canyon Foundation | Laguna Coast Wilderness Park and Aliso and Wood Canyons Wilderness Park |
| Oct. 1 | Taste of Laguna, canceled for 2026 | Festival of Arts grounds |
| Oct. 4 | Rotary Club of Laguna Beach Classic Car Show and Oktoberfest, 22nd annual | Forest and Laguna Canyon lot, 551 Forest Avenue |
What's actually filling the gap
National Public Lands Day and the Rotary event on that list didn't need the Festival grounds to begin with, and both are worth putting on the calendar in Taste of Laguna's absence. National Public Lands Day on September 26 is a partnership between the Laguna Beach Chamber and Laguna Canyon Foundation, run in coordination with OC Parks at Laguna Coast Wilderness Park and Aliso and Wood Canyons Wilderness Park. It's the country's largest single-day volunteer event for public land, and Laguna's version spreads across three sites rather than one.
The Rotary Club of Laguna Beach's Classic Car Show and Oktoberfest returns October 4 for its 22nd year at the Forest and Laguna Canyon lot on Forest Avenue, a few blocks from downtown. It's an invitational show built around antiques, hot rods, and muscle cars, paired with bratwurst, pretzels, a beer garden, and live music. Proceeds go toward local nonprofit programs and scholarships for Laguna Beach High School students, which makes it one of the few fall events on this list that funds something specific and local rather than a general operating budget.
What this means if you live here
If you were counting on Taste of Laguna for your October plans, that reservation isn't happening this year, and there's no confirmed word yet on whether it returns in 2027. What replaces it isn't a single event but a shift in where the town's energy is landing this fall. A free surf museum a block from Main Beach. A volunteer day spread across two wilderness parks. A Rotary car show on Forest Avenue that's been running for over two decades without needing anyone else's liquor license. None of these depend on the Festival of Arts grounds sorting out its restaurant situation, which is exactly why they're the events actually happening.
For anyone curious how the rest of downtown has shifted this year, from Coast Highway's restaurant turnover to the Sawdust and Festival of Arts seasons themselves, our earlier look at what changed on Coast Highway this summer covers the dining side of the story. And if you're weighing what daily life actually looks like in this pocket of the coast, our Laguna Beach neighborhood guide is a good next stop.
Emily and the team at Emily Sells OC live and work in these same few square miles, which means we're usually the first to hear when something on the calendar shifts. If you're weighing a move within Laguna Beach or just want a second set of eyes on your home's position in today's market, request a free home consultation any time.
