The city is considering demolishing the long-standing Tony Dapolito Recreation Center in the West Village.

The building has been shuttered for years amid ongoing repairs. Now, the city is weighing if it’s better to just start over with a new facility.

"The anchors that used to hold these lime style elements onto the building are no longer present due to rust over 100 years, and they're beginning to fall,” New York City Department of Parks and Recreation professional engineer Benjamin Conable said as he demonstrated some of the challenges the department has encountered.

The Parks Department shut down the Clarkson Street center in 2020 ahead of what ballooned into a $20 million project to repair the structure, which houses an indoor and outdoor pool, a basketball court and fitness area, among other things.

Parks Commissioner Sue Donoghue took NY1 on a walk-through of the building Wednesday. She said tearing down the building and putting up a new one around the corner at 388 Hudson St. would be a better use of taxpayer dollars.

“It’s a building of this age, almost 100 years old,” Donoghue said. “Once you start the work and start opening up walls and seeing things, you see that you're dealing with often more significant issues than you realized."

Some of the issues include an unstable vaulted ceiling; unstable and falling facade; scaffolding that prevents the outdoor pool from being opened; and a leaking indoor pool.

Parks officials also said that even with a renovation, many of the spaces, such as the basketball court, are impossible to bring up to code.

Andrew Berman, the executive director of Village Preservation, does not think the building needs to be torn down.

"We have buildings that are not only this age, but a century or more older that have lived fruitfully for more than two centuries, continuing to serve the public,” Berman said.

Some West Village residents waiting for the pools to open for the past five years agree.

"It's not the money that they say it's going to cost,” Jerry Jackson said. “Usually they say something like that just to have [an] excuse for not doing [it]."

"I come here to use and every year I'm waiting for the pool to be open, and it's not open,” he added.

Ultimately, this is the Parks Department’s decision, but officials there said they’re taking into account the public’s feedback through community outreach. They’re going to discuss next steps with Community Board 2. No decision has been made yet.