Replacing Griffith Park’s historic but idle swimming pool is likely to take at least three years and cost $40 million while delivering a competition pool, a neighboring recreational pool and a rehabilitated pool house with a gender-neutral bathhouse facility, city officials and designers told Los Feliz residents at an open house meeting Thursday night.
“The pool is being completely replaced. It leaks like a sieve,” said Stephanie Kingsnorth, principal of the architecture firm Perkins Eastman, addressing about 50 community members in a room next to the park’s visitor center.
Perkins Eastman, which is leading the design of the pool site, also worked on the renovation and expansion of Griffith Observatory from 2002 to 2006, when the firm was known as Pfeiffer Partners.
The pool and pool house at Riverside Drive and Los Feliz Boulevard date to 1927, long before Interstate 5 was routed just east of the site in 1964. After decades as a popular spot for children’s swim lessons and recreational lap swimmers, the pool was shut down amid COVID-19 pandemic measures in early 2020. When the city tried to refill the pool, workers found that it no longer held water.
At one point early in planning to replace it, the city Bureau of Engineering forecast construction costs of $28 million. City officials say the project is complicated because of the nearness of the freeway and the Los Angeles River.
Kingsnorth said the project is nearing the end of its design development stage, with many details still under discussion.
In place of the existing seasonal pool, schematic drawings now show a new year-round competition pool, 50 meters long, 25 yards wide and from 3-foot, 6-inches to 12-foot, 9-inches deep.
Next to it, drawings show a training pool 25 yards long and 50 feet wide, with an ADA-compliant gentle slope down to about 4 feet deep.
The two-story pool house’s red tile roof, wooden trellises and Spanish Colonial Revival features will look roughly the same on the outside, Kingsnorth said, and the rehabilitation will comply with federal standards for historic structures.
But some formerly open-air areas will now be covered. An elevator and second set of stairs will be added inside, along with features to boost energy sustainability and meet modern accessibility laws. The site’s open-air showers will be rinse-only.
On the ground floor, the building’s open-air male and female changing rooms will merge into one larger indoor gender-neutral area with private changing rooms and toilet stalls, Kingsnorth said.
“Every single toilet room and dressing room is an individual room,” Kingsnorth said.
Kingsnorth said the gender-neutral dressing room design was not mandated by state or federal restrictions but was a priority for the city’s Recreation and Parks Department. On projects like this, Kingsnorth said, “this is something that’s more common for equity and inclusion.”
Questions from the community focused on features of the pool, public access, cost and effects of the construction work.
“We’re very anxious to have the school come back, so that the kids can learn to swim,” said Marian Dodge, a longtime area resident and past president of the Los Feliz Improvement Assn.
The pool site is within City Council District 4, represented by Nithya Raman, who was not present. Her staffers organized the meeting and urged residents to send questions and comments to [email protected].
The next steps, a handout from the city and design firm read, include creation of construction documents (estimated at six months), obtaining city permits (five months), selecting a construction contractor (five months), construction (18 months), and “project close-out” (six months). If that schedule is met, completion would come in a little over 40 months, around July 2029.
“This is ambitious, but we’re confident that we can get there,” Kingsnorth said.
In an hourlong presentation, followed by about a dozen questions and answers, Kingsnorth was joined by city officials, including Ohaji Abdallah, assistant division head of the Bureau of Engineering’s architectural division, and Maha Yateem, the Recreation and Parks Department’s principal recreation supervisor for citywide aquatics.
The plan calls for three rows of shaded concrete bleachers for spectators alongside the competition pool. Yateem said the competition pool will include a diving board, adding that “we’re working on a location for that now.”
Because the project means removing tons of existing pool materials and bringing in new ones, “the construction here is going to be quite intense,” Abdallah said. He and Kingsnorth said the “haul route” of construction trucks has not been decided, and Abdallah said he and other officials are discussing the plan’s possible impact on Los Feliz Nursery School, which stands near the pool.
When considering construction costs and “soft costs” like design and environmental review, “I expect this to be about $40 million,” Abdallah said, adding that the project will be vying with other city priorities for dollars from the general fund. He also noted that current estimates were made “before the war started” in Iran and gas prices surged.
After the meeting, Kingsnorth said, “We’re ready to pause if we need to because of the outlying state of the world.”
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