Concerns About Deterioration at Children's Pool Spark Push for Historical Designation

La Jolla historian and resident: The La Jolla Children’s Pool is “melting from the inside”

A La Jolla woman is working to get a historical designation for the La Jolla children's pool to save the area from serious deterioration.

Diane Kane is the architectural historian behind the push to designate the children’s pool as a historical landmark. The La Jolla resident said she documented major deterioration at the children’s pool including cracks along the barrier wall, bordering the walkway.

Kane spent years collecting photos of the children's pool for her application to the National Register of Historic Places. When the organization got back to her this past summer, they asked for pictures without people. When Kane began retaking the pictures, she noticed a big change.

"This is melting from the inside. And it's got a lot of concrete there and a lot of rebar, but the problem is you don't know what is happening inside, you don't know how bad it is, and you don't know where it is,” said Kane, a La Jolla resident.

Kane noticed that within a few months, there were more stress fractures, caving and general decay since her first collected photos. Kane said the decay is raising the stakes for getting a historical landmark designation for the area. Kane said the City of San Diego will need to make repairs true to the original 1931 design, or else any fixes would be subject to modern building codes.

For example, the barrier wall along the coastal sidewalk would need to be raised to 4 feet tall. Kane said a repair like that would take away from the intimacy with the water allowed by the original design.

"If you want to fix it, you have to bring it up to code, which is going to be really expensive and it won't look at all the way it looks today. Or you do nothing, and it just melts and falls apart. And we're hoping for the middle one, which we think is reasonable and is doable, as long as this doesn't deteriorate past the point of no return,” said Kane.

NBC 7 reached out to the City of San Diego but by Monday evening NBC 7 had not yet received a response.

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