The Demise of the Ambassador Viewed as a Lost Opportunity

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For decades, the Ambassador Hotel was one of the jewels of Wilshire Boulevard. Movie stars flocked there while top Big Bands and other legends played at the famed Cocoanut Grove.


The hotel was also the stage for one of America’s darkest moments when Robert F. Kennedy who just delivered his victory speech after winning the California presidential primary was gunned down in the pantry nearly 40 years ago.


But last year, despite a decade-long campaign from preservationists, the hotel itself became a casualty, with most of its art deco structure torn down to make way for much-needed schools. The demolition marked one of the most glaring missed opportunities for L.A. to preserve its cultural heritage.


“It certainly stands out as a major loss,” said Ken Bernstein, manager of the office of historic resources with the Los Angeles city planning department.


The tale of how the famed hotel met the wrecking ball is long and convoluted, filled with near misses and grandiose plans. It’s also a reminder that when current needs confront past grandeur, the pressing demands of the present can be hard to resist.


Indeed, it’s often forgotten just how crucial the hotel was in launching the Wilshire “Boulevard of Dreams,” as the thoroughfare was once known.


In the late 1910s, Wilshire was still largely a dirt road, with pockets of exclusive development extending west of downtown. That all changed with the commissioning of famed architect Myron Hunt to build a grand hotel on a 23-acre dairy farm about five miles west of downtown.


The hotel, which opened in 1921, quickly became a magnet for silent movie stars and made the emerging boulevard a destination point. Five years later, another famous landmark, the Brown Derby restaurant with its trademark bowler hat, opened across the street.


In 1938, the Walker & Eisen-designed Cocoanut Grove nightclub was added to the hotel, instantly becoming a magnet for Big Bands and later generations of popular music performers, including “Rat Pack” stars Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. Around that same time, ownership of the hotel came into the hands of hotel mogul J. Myer Schine.



Cloudy horizon

But even as it was flourishing in those mid-century years, the area all around it was being transformed by skyscrapers. In 1957, plans were hatched to tear down the hotel and replace it with a more modern-looking hotel surrounded by high-rises. The Schine family rejected these plans and the hotel lived on, continuing to serve as a gathering center for Hollywood stars, performers and civic events.


Then came the Kennedy assassination in 1968, focusing a shocked nation’s attention on the Ambassador. After that, the Ambassador was no longer the preference for visiting dignitaries and celebrities who migrated westward to the newer Beverly Hilton and Century Plaza hotels.


Adding to the loss of prestige for the hotel was the overall decline of the mid-Wilshire corridor, which started in the late 1970s and gathered steam in the 1980s. Insurance companies and other high-rise office tenants left the area, putting a dent in local business and depriving the Schine family of the cash it needed to renovate the 60-year-old hotel.


Finally, in 1989, the Schine family sold the hotel for $64 million to a consortium including New York developer Donald Trump, who had plans to build the West Coast’s tallest skyscraper, at 125 stories, on the site. But the hotel had accrued tens of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance and needed major upgrades to comply with fire and safety codes.


Trump met with the Los Angeles Conservancy and other preservation advocates, but the development plans stalled as the hotel’s debts became clearer and the local commercial real estate market collapsed.


At the same time, preservation advocates lost a key battle to save the building. In 1988, they failed to get L.A. City Council approval to nominate the Ambassador building as a historic cultural monument. Instead, they had to settle for reassurances from the Council that the hotel would not be torn down until replacement buildings were approved.


“Did the Conservancy sell out? Some critics may have said so, but this deal did allow us to preserve the building for 13 more years than it otherwise would have been,” said Linda Dishman, executive director of the Los Angeles Conservancy.


Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Unified School District, facing an increasing shortage of classroom space in the area, also was eyeing the site for a major cluster of schools.


“It’s the most overcrowded area in the district. We have to bus 4,000 kids out of the area every day because of the shortage of classroom seats,” said Guy Mehula, chief facilities executive for the District.


In 1990, the District launched eminent domain proceedings on the property, setting off a decade-long legal battle for control of the Ambassador site. While the legal wrangling continued, the physical condition of the hotel itself worsened, making restoration of the hotel an even more daunting task.


Indeed, Mehula said the District’s initial intention was to retain the hotel building and make adaptations on the inside to allow for classroom uses. “But as we got into the entire project and looked at the structure itself, we found that we would have to spend a tremendous amount of money to upgrade the building to meet school safety and fire code standards,” he said.


Among the problems: concrete columns throughout the building lacked steel frames and shear walls to make them able to withstand earthquakes; low ceilings would have to be raised to accommodate heating and air conditioning systems; and there was insufficient daylight.


District officials estimated it would cost up to $100 million more to renovate the existing hotel to meet current safety standards than to simply tear the hotel down and start from scratch. “And even after we did all that work, we would still be left with a substandard school,” Mehula said.


That view did not sit well with the Conservancy and other preservation activists, who launched a campaign to save the hotel. They repeatedly presented plans to the district that called for the main hotel building to be preserved while the rest of the grounds could be used for classroom space. In one plan, the Conservancy proposed that the main building be converted into senior housing.


But District officials countered that there simply wasn’t enough space on the rest of the grounds to put the number of classrooms needed. Their preferred plan was to tear down most of the main hotel building.


However, a showdown was avoided in the mid-1990s as the District focused its attention on another site three miles away that wasn’t likely to run into opposition from preservationists: Belmont. Of course, Belmont ran into its own problems in the late 1990s as reports surfaced that the $200 million-plus school was being built on top of a contaminated oil field. That fiasco, which cost several school board members their seats, forced the District in 2000 to return to the Ambassador site.



Round two


By this time, the development consortium minus Trump that owned the site was in such dire financial straits that it filed for bankruptcy protection. The school district swooped in and won title to the site in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, setting the stage for the final showdown with preservation advocates.


Then-Superintendent Roy Romer made the decision to push ahead with the school project, winning approval from the school board in late 2004. Helping tip the board’s hand was a letter from the Kennedy family saying that Robert Kennedy would have preferred new classrooms being built on the site over maintaining a memorial to his assassination.


The L.A. Conservancy filed suit to stop the district. But the conservancy lost in court in 2005, setting the stage for the demolition of the Ambassador Hotel in late 2005 and the groundbreaking for the $309 million school project last year. The site is slated to open to students in 2009, with completion of the school facilities by the fall of 2010. An elementary school, middle school and high school that together will house more than 4,000 students are planned for the 23-acre site.

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Howard Fine
Howard Fine is a 23-year veteran of the Los Angeles Business Journal. He covers stories pertaining to healthcare, biomedicine, energy, engineering, construction, and infrastructure. He has won several awards, including Best Body of Work for a single reporter from the Alliance of Area Business Publishers and Distinguished Journalist of the Year from the Society of Professional Journalists.

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