LOS ANGELES — A City Council committee agreed Tuesday to add $2.4 million to the retrofit of the reading room at Hollywood’s regional branch library, after engineers found more structural trouble behind the walls than the original contract had assumed.
The reading room, a high-windowed hall that has served generations of students, job seekers and afternoon readers, closed in December 2024 for seismic bracing and an overhaul of its aging heating and cooling systems. The work was scheduled to take about a year. It will now stretch well into 2026, with library officials privately hoping for a summer reopening and declining to promise one publicly.
“We opened up the ceiling and the building told us the truth,” said a Bureau of Engineering project manager who briefed the committee. “The framing was not what the old drawings showed. You cannot brace a wall you have misjudged, so we stopped, redesigned, and that costs both time and money.”
The added money covers the redesign, a longer equipment rental, and asbestos abatement in a mechanical chase that was not in the original scope. It comes out of a citywide facilities reserve rather than new taxes, which several committee members were careful to point out.
Councilmember Alicia Rendón, whose district includes the branch, said she supported the additional spending but wanted a firmer schedule than the one she was handed.
“Every month that room is dark, a kid does his homework somewhere worse,” Rendón said. “I understand old buildings surprise you. What I need is a date I can give people that I don’t have to walk back three times.”
The closure has strained the rest of the branch. Staff moved as many programs as they could into a smaller community room and onto the sidewalk in good weather, but the reading room held most of the quiet study seating, and its absence has been felt by the students and remote workers who treated it as a second office.
“It was the one place around here you could sit for four hours and nobody asked you to buy anything,” said Priscilla Oyelaran, 22, a community-college student who now studies at a coffee shop when she can afford the coffee. “I miss the lamps. I know that sounds small. It wasn’t small to me.”
Library administrators say the retrofit, once finished, should protect the room for another half-century and finally give it a climate system that does not shut down every heat wave. That argument won the day; the committee approved the money without a dissenting vote and sent it to the full council.
Rendón, leaving the hearing, said she had asked her staff to post the construction schedule on the branch door and update it whenever it changed, so that the neighbors watching the plywood could at least watch it honestly. Whether the door says summer or fall by the time the fencing comes down, she said, is the part nobody in the room would guarantee.