"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 already know the pool has a habit of not opening when it's supposed to. What's less obvious is that the delay isn't random. It follows a pattern, and once you see the pattern, the announced date stops being the thing worth tracking.
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. That confusion is itself useful information. If people actively writing about this project can't agree on which estimate is current, the announced date was never something to plan a summer around.
Why the Number Keeps Climbing
The jump from $28 million to $40 million wasn't a scope change so much as a reflection of what building in Los Angeles costs once every phase gets priced out. 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, which is less a statement about the design and more about what it costs to build anything at this scale inside the city's regulatory framework right now.
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, which means the haul route itself hasn't been finalized. That's worth remembering: a project without a settled haul route is a project that hasn't locked its construction start date either, whatever a press release says.
The Rest of the Park Isn't Waiting
It's worth putting the pool's slippage next to something in the same park that didn't slip at all. 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, and it landed exactly on schedule because an institutional anniversary runs on a calendar, not a construction permit. The contrast is useful. Not everything in Griffith Park moves at the pace of the pool project. Programming and operating milestones tend to happen when they're supposed to. Capital rebuilds that require environmental review, historic sign-off, and a competitive contractor bid are a different animal entirely, and they're the ones worth watching skeptically.
What to Watch Instead of the Date
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 know when the Plunge is actually coming back, stop anchoring to whatever completion year is in the most recent headline and watch for three concrete markers instead. A finalized haul route means the city has settled how construction traffic moves through the neighborhood, which only happens once a contractor and schedule are close to locked. A signed construction contract means the five-month contractor selection window that Perkins Eastman described has actually closed. And a permit issuance date is the one milestone that turns a schedule into a commitment, because everything after it is measured in fixed months rather than "if things go according to plan."
Until one of those three things happens, the mid-2029 date is a working estimate, not a promise. That's not cynicism. It's just how the last four years have gone. The city has now revised this project's cost and timeline once already after issuing a public number, and the second number came with the same caveats as the first.
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. Just don't set your calendar by the announcement. Set it by the permit.
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.
