HOLLYWOOD — The orange fencing that had boxed in a stretch of the Walk of Fame near Highland Avenue since spring came down last week, and within days the same barriers reappeared two blocks to the west, where a fresh run of cracked terrazzo is scheduled to be lifted and reset through the summer.
The shift marks the end of the first finished segment of the city’s panel-by-panel repaving, the slow replacement of sunken and broken stars that began in May with a marching band and an oversized pair of scissors. Crews spent about six weeks on the opening block, forming, tinting and curing each square before moving to the next, and the completed sidewalk now looks, up close, like the Boulevard many longtime merchants had stopped expecting to see.
“I walked it the morning they reopened it, before the tour buses were out,” said Renata Voss, who has sold sunglasses and film-reel keychains from a stall on the finished block for nine years. “No tripping hazard. No puddle where the old panel had sunk. I’d forgotten what that felt like.”
The mood is different one block over, where shopkeepers are now doing the arithmetic that Voss did last winter. The fencing narrows the walkable sidewalk, steers foot traffic toward the far curb, and, by several accounts, quietly reroutes the impulse shopper who might otherwise have stopped in.
“Every foot of plywood in front of my window is a customer who keeps walking,” said Amir Sadeghi, whose souvenir shop sits mid-block on the newly fenced stretch. He said he understood the work had to happen, and would rather it happen now than never, but wished the city had staged the closures to spare storefronts the longest exposure. “Finish it fast. That is the whole request.”
A project spokesman said crews were holding to the original sequence, which runs the work east to west in short segments so the Boulevard never closes fully for premieres, tours and the daily tourist trade. He repeated the pledge to complete the corridor “within the year,” a phrase that has already hardened into a running joke among merchants who have heard the city promise a finished sidewalk before.
The ground remains the unknown. Crews on the first block found utility lines older than the stars above them and lost several days working around a patched water main that appeared on no current drawing. Nothing about the next block is expected to be simpler.
For now the tour guides have adapted. One led her group along the open curb on Monday, stopping at the fresh panels to explain, with some improvisation, why a slab of new terrazzo counts as a Hollywood attraction. A city worker knelt at the seam where old sidewalk met new, drawing a float along the edge and checking it against a taut string, untroubled by the phones raised behind him.
The fencing is expected to hold on the current block into August. After that, another row of merchants gets its turn to watch.