As Hoodline reported, "I expect this to be about $40 million," Ohaji Abdallah of the city's Bureau of Engineering told a room of roughly 50 residents at the Griffith Park Visitor Center in March. He was talking about the Griffith Park Pool, the fenced-off "Municipal Plunge" at 3401 Riverside Drive that has sat empty since 2020. It was the second time in under a year that the number had changed. In July 2025, the same project was priced at $28 million with a completion target of March 2028. Eight months later, the estimate had grown by more than 40 percent and the finish line had slid past it by over a year, to mid-2029.
If you live near Los Feliz or Atwater Village and have watched that chain-link fence become part of the landscape, you have seen the pool remain closed through earlier projected reopening dates. The current estimate is mid-2029; the project milestones below offer additional ways to follow its progress.
Four Years, Three Numbers
The pool was supposed to reopen in June 2022. That date came and went when city workers, prepping to refill the tank after its pandemic closure, discovered the foundation had cracked badly enough that it could no longer hold water. What had been a maintenance problem became a full rebuild.
By July 2025, the city had a plan: a $28 million renovation managed by Alex Ngo of the Bureau of Engineering, within Council District 4 and Councilmember Nithya Raman's district, with construction expected to start in September 2026 and wrap by March 2028. The project was still in pre-design, with a formal kickoff meeting set for December 2025.
Then came the March 2026 open house, and a materially different set of numbers. The estimate jumped to $40 million. Architecture firm Perkins Eastman, now leading the site design, laid out a tentative schedule for attendees: six months for construction documents, five months for permits, five months to select a contractor, 18 months of construction, and six months of close-out. That's 40 months from a design phase that itself hadn't concluded, which is how a 2028 completion became a mid-2029 one. City staff were careful to caveat even that: the schedule depends on permit approvals, contractor selection, and whether the project keeps pace with competing budget priorities.
Some outlets covering the story since have still cited the older 2028 completion date, with one blog even tying it to the 2028 Summer Olympics that Los Angeles is set to host. Readers may encounter both projected completion dates in coverage of the project.
How the Estimate Compares
The estimate rose from $28 million to $40 million. California pool construction carries structural cost drivers that don't show up in most other states: mandatory environmental review under CEQA, historic preservation compliance since the pool house contributes to Griffith Park's monument designation, strict ADA and seismic standards, and prevailing wage requirements that can add an estimated 13 to 35 percent to labor costs. Soft costs alone, meaning design, permitting, and environmental review rather than actual construction, have been documented running three to five times higher in California than in lower-regulation states like Texas.
Set against national benchmarks, the number is easier to place. Public pool construction has run around $488 per square foot as of 2024 data, and a simple outdoor municipal pool typically lands between $2 million and $10 million. Complex aquatic centers with both competition and recreational components, the closer comparison here, generally cost $15 million to $25 million in most mid-sized American cities. Recent basic rebuilds in Oregon and Washington have come in as low as $2 million to $3.1 million, with more ambitious versions reaching $7.9 million to $10.9 million. At $40 million, the Griffith Park project sits well above that upper range.
What Actually Gets Built
Assuming the money and the timeline hold, what replaces the old pool is not a like-for-like restoration. The original Plunge ran 225 feet long and 50 feet wide, shallow at both ends and deepest in the middle, entered through a Spanish Colonial Revival pool house with an arched arcade. It was, when it opened in 1927, intended to be the largest outdoor pool in Southern California.
The rebuild splits that single tank into two: a 50-meter competition pool and a 25-yard training pool with an ADA-compliant gradual slope entry, plus spectator bleachers and energy-efficiency upgrades. The pool house's Spanish Colonial Revival exterior is slated for preservation, while the interior gets a full modernization, including gender-neutral changing facilities. It's a different facility inside a familiar shell, built for lessons and lap swimming rather than the mass-capacity plunge it once was.
Residents at the March meeting focused less on the design and more on what construction actually looks like at street level. Questions centered on haul routes, truck staging, and the impact on the Los Feliz Nursery School, which sits close enough to the site that heavy equipment traffic became the meeting's most pressed topic. City staff said they're still working through construction staging to limit that disruption; the haul route remains unsettled, so construction planning is still in progress.
Other Griffith Park Programming
Griffith Observatory marked its 90th anniversary this year with a full slate of programming, including star parties and a special screening tied to the anniversary of Rebel Without a Cause. The pool project follows a different process, with milestones that include environmental review, historic sign-off, and a competitive contractor bid.
Project Milestones to Follow
If you want a pool this summer, the practical answer hasn't changed: the nearest city-run alternatives are in Echo Park, Hollywood, and Glassell Park. If you want to follow the Plunge's projected return, watch for three concrete markers. A finalized haul route means the city has settled how construction traffic moves through the neighborhood. A signed construction contract means the five-month contractor selection window that Perkins Eastman described has actually closed. And a permit issuance date is one milestone to watch, but it does not make the schedule a commitment: the timeline still depends on contractor selection and competing budget priorities.
The mid-2029 date is a working estimate, not a promise. The March 2026 estimate followed the July 2025 public estimate and remains subject to the stated conditions.
For anyone weighing what this kind of infrastructure investment means for the neighborhoods around it, a rebuilt, ADA-accessible, year-round aquatic facility next to Griffith Park is a genuine long-term asset once it's real. For a clearer indication of timing, watch for these project milestones.
If you're thinking about your own place in this part of Los Angeles, whether that's a property near the park or somewhere else entirely, Aaron Kirman brings the same instinct for tracking what's actually happening on the ground, not just what's been announced, to every conversation about the city's neighborhoods. Let's Connect.
