A Love of History, the Harbor and 100 Cats

Friends tell her to travel--go to Paris, see Rome, enjoy her life. But Judy Cairns has got her cats, maybe 100 of them, feral cats she feeds every afternoon from the back of her battered station wagon, a 1989 Ford with no grille and a bumper and headlight lashed on with pieces of cord.

People call her eccentric. OK, she’ll plead guilty to that. Cairns sees things in a different way than most others do.

Her wagon pulls up outside Warehouse No. 1, the oldest warehouse at Los Angeles Harbor and a place special to her for many reasons. It is part of her daily rounds. Her streaked blond hair flies in the breeze as she gazes at the 4 o’clock sun on the west wall--an imposing facade with lion’s-head gargoyles masking the drain spouts.

The gargoyles are the only nod to aesthetics on a building that opened in 1917. Much of the paint has been stripped away. Concrete fire escapes zigzag down from the roof. They are so badly eroded that chunks are falling away, exposing rusted rebar. Chain-link screens catch the dropping fragments.

“Look at it,” Cairns gushes. “It’s wonderful--it’s magical! Everyone wants to modernize and sanitize. It’s perfect the way it is.”

Cairns loves the building’s raw grandeur just as she loves the unwanted cats that skulk among the weeds and rocks at the water’s edge. She has roamed the warehouse’s dim rooms hundreds of times, placing traps for strays she will have spayed or neutered. Years ago, when the Los Angeles Harbor Department developed a plan to raze the antiquated structure, Cairns attended the hearings, fighting to save it.

Few remember when the building helped open the West Coast to international trade, enabling Los Angeles to become one of the world’s leading ports. Completed shortly after the Panama Canal, the 500,000-square-foot warehouse was the conduit for millions of tons of imports that fed the burgeoning metropolis. Its usefulness waned with the advent of modern cargo containers, which are too large for its narrow portals and low ceilings. But the warehouse remains in use and is now designated a historical landmark.

I have met Cairns to tour it, and to see her feed the cats. She wears a summery yellow blouse and red lipstick. She is a talker--glib, funny--but is edgy about being a focus of attention.

We enter the warehouse through the north end, where three square loading bays open under a wall that appears smoke-stained, like the bricks above an old hearth. Trains used to enter here. Inside, wire-glass windows allow a minimal amount of light. Many of the bare bulbs are burned out.

“We always wanted to use this for a community Halloween party,” Cairns says as we board a huge freight elevator with John Wiggins, an executive of Crescent Warehouse Co., which operates the building. “At night, it takes on a different character--really eerie.”

Cairns’ late father was a merchant seaman. He used to drive her to the docks to watch freighters come in and tell stories about the sea. In those days, the warehouse was a quarantine post for imported animals--camels, llamas, Brahma bulls. She remembers seeing giraffes--or she imagined them--sticking their heads out the cargo bays.

Rooms echo. Some are stacked ceiling-high with boxes; others are barren.

A steel slide spirals through the center of one room. It used to speed boxes from the top floor all the way to the bottom. “Modern technology in 1917,” Wiggins says. He hollers for the elevator and the sound reverberates for eight or nine seconds.

Commerce is slow now, Wiggins says. Toward fall, when the stores start thinking about Christmas, maybe things will pick up.

Cairns works alone feeding her cats. She calls to them by name, “Hey, Joe! Meow! Meow!” For more than a decade, Cairns has set out her canned food and kibble every afternoon, through rain and flu and holidays and hardship. Only six cats are fed at the warehouse--that is her limit here--but she makes other stops along the waterfront.

She also tends the cats in the brush near the Rolling Hills General Store and in a park near her home in San Pedro.

We talk later over chips and soft drinks. Her knowledge of harbor issues and history is deep and eclectic. The next morning, however, there is a message on my answering machine: She no longer wants to be part of a story. Use someone else.

We exchange messages. We talk. She is filled with inner conflict--her privacy versus raising awareness of the cats. More than a million cats live on the streets of Los Angeles, by the city’s estimate. People who dump them off don’t understand the numbers of kittens that die, Cairns says, or the hunger and disease that many suffer.

She agrees--reluctantly--to keep talking. I ask her age. “We don’t discuss that,” she answers, but she tells of writing a letter some years ago to Captain Kangaroo. Why was it, she wondered, that adults lose their zest for life? She could be any age of her choosing, the Captain wrote back. “Consequently, I’m 11 years old,” Cairns says.

I probe her past, her interests, her jobs. She loved scuba diving, aerobatics. She admired Amelia Earhart. She was an editor for various automotive and dirt-bike magazines.

It turns out she was engaged once--twice, actually. One of her fiances died of cancer. The other was killed in a racing crash. She won’t discuss their names or the dates or any other particulars.

“There are still some sore spots,” she says.

During her suffering, she would drive down and park next to Warehouse No. 1, watching the freighters come in. That’s when it started, in 1982, when she first began feeding the cats.

She would take short breaks from it in those days, but now she never misses. She also spends her time clipping coupons and shopping for shut-ins. She swings by Kelly’s Korner, the little deli at Rolling Hills General Store, and picks up the unsold sandwiches that Jim Kelly gives her. She drives around and gives them to the homeless--people living in their cars, in the bushes near the harbor.

“They’ve fallen on hard times and they just need a little help,” she says.

But why is it her burden? What continues to drive her? Cairns almost laughs.

“I’m greedy,” she says. “I get such pleasure. It’s fun. I love doing this.”