HOLLYWOOD — The gymnasium doors at the Hollywood Recreation Center opened to the public on Monday for the first time since November, and by mid-morning a group from the day camp had already worn a fresh squeak into the refinished floor.
The center, at the edge of one of the neighborhood’s older parks, closed last fall for what the city called a four-month refresh: new gym flooring, a rebuilt roof over the clubroom, updated wiring, and a pair of accessible restrooms the building had done without for most of its life. Four months became nine. Crews found rot above the clubroom ceiling that appeared on none of the drawings, and the job stopped twice while the city waited on materials.
“We told families February. Then we told them spring. After a while you stop naming dates,” said Marisol Enderby, 46, the center’s director, who ran the summer program out of a rented canopy and the park’s outdoor courts through the closure. “The children never asked about the roof. They asked why the hoops were chained.”
For most of the spring the two outdoor courts carried the whole operation. Pickup games that used to spill inside on hot afternoons stayed on the asphalt instead, under a shade sail the staff strung between two poles. A rec-league that meets on Tuesday evenings moved its games to a school gym across the neighborhood and lost a third of its players to the commute.
Ronnie Sackville, 71, has played a morning half-court game at the park for the better part of thirty years and kept coming even after the building went dark. “The court out here is where the game actually is,” he said, nodding at the asphalt. “The gym’s for when it rains, which around here is a joke. But it’s ours, and it was locked, and that stung more than I expected.”
The finished work is modest and mostly invisible — the kind of maintenance that only announces itself when it fails. Enderby walked a visitor past the new restrooms, the patched ceiling and a storage room that no longer smells of mildew, and seemed proudest of a drinking fountain that now runs cold. The gym floor was resealed in its original two-tone pattern at the insistence of longtime users, who had objected loudly to an early plan to paint over it.
Councilmember Alicia Rendón’s office, which pushed for the roof money in last year’s budget, sent a staff member to the reopening with a short statement about neighborhood investment. Enderby read it, thanked him, and went back to signing camp kids in.
The delay left one casualty the renovation did not fix: fall basketball registration, which normally opens in August, will run late this year because the sign-up computers were boxed for storage and no one is sure which box. Enderby said she expected to sort it out by the weekend. The line at the door, she noted, had already sorted itself.