HOLLYWOOD — The Hollywood High School marching band got through two numbers on Tuesday morning while a row of officials waited for a ribbon long enough to stretch across a closed section of sidewalk, and then, on a count, the scissors came out.
The ceremony marked the official start of the Walk of Fame repaving, a panel-by-panel replacement of the cracked and sunken terrazzo that has defined the Boulevard’s most-photographed sidewalk for decades. City crews poured the first fresh square of pink-and-charcoal terrazzo near Hollywood and Highland while the band held a note, and a small crowd of merchants, tour guides and curious tourists applauded a slab of wet concrete.
Councilmember Alicia Rendón, who has pushed for the money since before the pandemic, told the crowd the work would be finished “within the year, weather and Hollywood permitting.” The phrase drew a laugh from the people who have watched the sidewalk deteriorate and a flatter look from a few who have heard the city promise things before.
The condition of the corridor is not in question. An engineering survey in 2023 found that nearly a third of the terrazzo panels between La Brea and Vine had cracked, tilted or sunk past the point of patching — a finding this paper reported at the time under the headline “The Stars Are Not All Right.” Years of tour-bus exhaust, jackhammered utility repairs and the plain weight of foot traffic had done what time does.
What comes next is slow by design. The terrazzo cannot be poured by machine in long ribbons; each panel is formed, tinted, set with its brass letters and coral field, and left to cure before the next is begun. Crews can close only short segments at a time, because the Boulevard cannot fully close — star unveilings, film shoots and the daily tourist trade all depend on the sidewalk staying open.
“I want to be happy about this. I am, mostly,” said Dov Halberstam, who has run a souvenir stand on the block for eleven years and watched three feet of sidewalk in front of his door buckle over a bad water main. “But ‘within the year’ in this neighborhood can mean a lot of things. Ask me in the spring.”
The project’s manager, standing near the fresh panel, said the schedule assumed no surprises underground, which he acknowledged was an optimistic assumption on a street this old. The utility lines beneath the Walk of Fame are a century of improvisation, and no one is entirely sure what the crews will find once they start lifting panels in earnest.
For the ceremony, at least, the mood held. A tour guide walked her group up to the fencing to watch the trowel work, narrating the repair as if it were another attraction. The band packed up. A city worker smoothed the edge of the new panel with a float, checked it against a taut string line, and covered it against the sun.
The first star to be lifted and reset, officials said, would be chosen by lottery. The rest of the Boulevard would wait its turn, block by block, for however long that turned out to take.