HOLLYWOOD — The corner sits two blocks from a public elementary school in central Hollywood, and for as long as the neighborhood can remember it has had everything except a marked place to cross: a stop sign on one street, none on the other, parked cars that hide a short child until the last second, and a steady turn of drivers cutting through to beat the light on the boulevard.
With classes back in session this week, a group of parents has decided this is the year they stop asking politely.
“I watched a truck stop about a foot from a first-grader in May,” said Delia Marchetti, who has two children at the school and started circulating a petition over the summer. “The driver wasn’t even speeding. He just couldn’t see her. That’s the corner. It isn’t bad luck, it’s the design.”
Parents say they have raised the crossing with the city for years, through the school and on their own, and have watched the request disappear into a queue of traffic studies. The city evaluates such corners against citywide criteria for crash history and traffic counts, a process that residents describe, not without sympathy, as slow enough to outlast a child’s entire time at the school.
In the meantime the safest passage is a retiree with a handheld sign. Enid Corliss, 68, has walked out to the corner most mornings for three years, unpaid, wearing a borrowed reflective vest.
“I am not a crossing guard, whatever the parents call me,” she said. “I’m a neighbor with a stop paddle and no authority. Somebody with a badge should be doing this, or better yet nobody should have to.”
The group is asking for a marked crosswalk, fresh curb paint and, if the budget allows, a flashing pedestrian beacon — modest fixes, they argue, against the cost of the alternative. Sam Okonkwo, whose daughter started kindergarten this fall, said he was struck by how small the request was next to how long it had gone unmet.
“We’re not asking for a bridge,” he said. “We’re asking for paint and a sign. I keep waiting for the catch.”
A city transportation spokeswoman said the location was under review and that engineers would visit to take counts this fall, but offered no timeline for any work. She noted that requests across the district far outnumber the crews available to fulfill them, a point the parents said they had heard before.
Marchetti has told the parents to keep their expectations low and their sign-up sheet long. She plans to bring the petition, and a stack of photographs of the corner at the morning bell, to the next neighborhood council meeting. If nothing comes of it, she said, she will bring them to the one after that, and Corliss will be back on the corner in her vest either way.