Crews demolishing Costa Mesa community center to make room for new library

Major demolition work began this week on Costa Mesa’s Neighborhood Community Center to make way for a new library.

The community center, which is part of Lions Park, was built in the 1980s. Though city officials originally considered converting the roughly 24,000-square-foot center into a new library, the proposal was eventually scrapped because the center needed a considerable amount of work.

The new library will be two stories and contain about 22,860 square feet of space. Lions Park’s existing library, the circular, 8,740-square-foot Donald Dungan branch, will be repurposed into a meeting space to make up for the loss of the community center.

The Lions Park projects are expected to cost a total of about $36.5 million, according to recent estimates, and be completed in 2020.

bradley.zint@latimes.com

Twitter: @BradleyZint