HOLLYWOOD — The third deadline came and went last Tuesday, marked by no ceremony except a new sign zip-tied to the fencing at Hollywood and Highland: SIDEWALK CLOSED, USE OTHER SIDE.

The Walk of Fame restoration — a panel-by-panel replacement of cracked terrazzo that began fourteen months ago with a ribbon-cutting and a marching band — was originally scheduled to wrap in March. Then June. As of this week, the contractor’s revised schedule promises completion “by the holidays,” a phrase merchants along the affected blocks have begun repeating with a certain edge.

“Which holidays?” asked Dora Feldman, who has sold maps and postcards from the same storefront for twenty-two years. “They didn’t say which holidays.”

The project’s scope is not in dispute. Decades of foot traffic, tour buses idling at the curb, and at least one runaway delivery truck have left whole stretches of the famous sidewalk cracked, patched, or sunken. Engineers who surveyed the corridor in 2023 found nearly a third of the panels between La Brea and Vine in need of full replacement — a finding this paper reported at the time under the headline “The Stars Are Not All Right.”

What is in dispute is the pace. Work crews may only close short segments at a time, both to keep the sidewalk passable and to accommodate the small daily ceremonies of the Boulevard: star unveilings, film shoots, and the tourist economy that depends on visitors being able to find, and stand on, a particular name.

“It’s like repaving a freeway you can never fully close,” said a project spokesman, who noted that each panel is cast, cured, and inlaid largely by hand. “The terrazzo doesn’t care about your schedule.”

The delays have real costs. Feldman estimates foot traffic past her shop is down by a quarter when the fencing goes up on her block. The merchants’ association has asked the city for a rent-relief program modeled on one used during subway construction in the nineties; that request is, in the words of one city staffer, “moving through channels.”

Longtime residents note, with some fatigue, that this is not the Boulevard’s first such saga. The Times’ own archive records a 1958 resurfacing project that ran two years over schedule and prompted one columnist to propose paving the street with “something cheaper than fame.”

For now, the work continues panel by panel, block by block. On Thursday morning, a crew was carefully leveling a fresh square of pink terrazzo while a tour group watched through the fence, photographing the wet concrete as if it, too, were famous.

By the holidays, then. Which holidays, no one would say.