Oakland broke ground July 30 on a $34 million-plus rebuild of the Lincoln Recreation Center at 250 10th Street in Chinatown — a nearly 50-year-old building coming down this month to be replaced by a far larger facility that doubles as the city's first municipal 'resilience hub.'

On the block bounded by 10th, 11th, Harrison and Alice, the Lincoln Recreation Center is about to disappear. The city broke ground July 30 on a rebuild of the aging Chinatown center at 250 10th Street, and demolition of the roughly 7,500-square-foot building is scheduled for this month. The new center will be a two-story building of 22,221 square feet, with a larger gymnasium, indoor courts, afterschool classrooms and a commercial kitchen.

The numbers under it are concrete. Oakland's City Council approved a $28.4 million construction contract with S.J. Amoroso Construction on June 2; the full project runs past $34 million, designed by Oakland's Shah Kawasaki Architects with Merrill Morris Partners. The money is stacked from a decade of separate awards: $1.7 million in Measure KK bond funds allocated in 2019, an $8.5 million state Proposition 68 parks grant, a $9.25 million state Community Resilience Centers grant in 2023, a $2 million federal earmark, and $8 million in federal tree-planting money, among others. Construction is expected to run about 18 months, with completion targeted for summer 2028.

The rebuild's unusual feature is what happens when the power goes out. The center is being built as Oakland's first municipal "resilience hub" — a place neighbors can shelter during wildfires, heat, earthquakes or grid shutoffs. Plans call for rooftop solar and battery storage for multi-day power independence, MERV-13 air filtration, showers, and refrigeration where residents can keep medication. The project targets LEED Gold and fulfills an action item in the city's 2030 climate plan.

None of it arrived quickly. Friends of Lincoln Square Park, the community group that drove the fundraising, formed in 2016; co-founder Tiffany Eng told Oaklandside that talks about a new center were already 30 years old when she began combing through meeting transcripts. Gilbert Gong, the center's director, grew up playing at Lincoln Square as a child and has spent more than 25 years running the building — one with a broken heating system, four bathroom stalls and wiring that blew a fuse if you plugged in two things at once. "The park cared for me and took care of me as a child," Gong told Oaklandside after the ceremony, "and I'm trying to reciprocate that."

Walk past 250 10th Street later this month and the building will be behind fencing, then gone.