How do you assess the architectural and cultural value of a building where the Rat Pack once literally tore the joint to pieces, and Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated?
That has become the prickly task of a host of players trying to decide the fate of the Ambassador Hotel in the Mid-Wilshire district. The prospective developer of the property, Wilshire Center Marketplace, has been locked in a long-running legal battle with the L.A. Unified School District over the site. The many particulars of the feud could match the Dead Sea Scrolls in their complexity.
But the crux of it is this: until the developer, the LAUSD, the Los Angeles Conservancy and Wilshire-area stakeholders can agree on whether the Ambassador is worth preserving, and in what form, the long-shuttered historic hotel will remain an empty husk in the center of one of L.A.’s fastest-growing communities.
“It’s difficult to make proposals when you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve,” said John Early, executive director of British developer AMEC, which is part of the Wilshire Center Marketplace consortium.
The LAUSD wants to build a school on the south portion of the Ambassador parcel, and WCM wants to construct a mixed-used retail/residential/hotel project on the north. WCM’s latest settlement proposal was rejected late last month by the LAUSD.
For many, the hotel is a piece of this city’s history, and groups such as the Conservancy, the Art Deco Society of L.A, and Concerned Americans for More Preservation insist that history is worth preserving.
Ambassador roots
The hotel is built on what was a dairy farm up until 1903. The parcel was sold to the Los Angeles Pacific Railway Co., but whatever plans it had for the property fell through and a hotel company purchased it.
The project became part of the Ambassador chain when S.W. Straus stepped in with some of the then-ungodly sum of $5 million needed to finish it. The architect was Myron Hunt, a member of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Chicago-based firm and the mind responsible for other regional landmarks such as the Rose Bowl, Occidental College and the Huntington Library.
The Ambassador’s doors were first opened on Jan 1, 1921, boasting 375 rooms in the main building and 125 in adjacent bungalows. It also featured gardens, an Olympic-size pool, tennis courts, a running track and a sweeping grandeur that established it without equal citywide.
Some believe its Zinnia Grill was L.A.’s first nightclub. Most agree that the Cocoanut Grove, which opened later, was the city’s most important nightspot up until the early ’50s, when Joan Crawford emerged victorious from numerous dance contests there. Years later, Sammy Davis Jr. was hired as a redesign consultant, and threw a “wrecking party” at which Rat Packers were invited to rip the place to bits in anticipation of a makeover.
The hotel’s guest list reads like a who’s who of 20th century American culture. One legend has it that Marion Davies rode a horse into the lobby to impress her paramour William Randolph Hearst, with whom she occupied the hotel’s entire east wing for a year. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald once fled the Ambassador at midnight, bills unpaid, room furniture piled and set ablaze.
Buster Crabbe trained for the Olympics in the hotel pool. The Oscar statuette made its debut there at the 1930 awards ceremony. Marilyn Monroe got her first break when she signed with Blue Book Models located in the hotel lobby. And finally, perhaps fatally for the establishment, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was murdered in the downstairs ballroom pantry on the night of his greatest political triumph.
Trying to please everybody
The L.A. Conservancy is leading the effort to preserve the Ambassador, as it did with St. Vibiana’s Cathedral downtown, and presently with Van de Kamp’s Bakery in Eagle Rock.
“We’ve tried to listen to all the concerns and figure out a way everybody gets part of the win the high schools, commercial development on Wilshire and the saving of the structure,” said the Conservancy’s Executive Director Linda Dishman.
The Art Deco Society of Los Angeles is working with the Conservancy on the Ambassador. President Mitzi March Mogul’s first choice would be for the Ambassador to be fully restored as a luxury hotel. She points out that downtown is reinventing itself, that more people have reasons to choose it as a place to stay, and that there are no luxury hotels between Beverly Hills and downtown, so there is money to be made.
Mogul says that architecturally, the Ambassador’s “very simplicity of design makes it classic.” She characterizes the style as pure Mediterranean, a transitional style to the Art Deco look that later typified Wilshire Boulevard and its environs. “Because there was such attention (by the original developer) to aesthetic, it still retains that look,” she said.
A walk through the hotel’s ground floor and surroundings is a walk back in time.
“It’s like a fly in amber,” Mogul says. The light fixtures are all working, and the eateries retain the furniture from the day the hotel closed 11 years ago. That freeze-frame scene, combined with peeling paint down its long corridors, evokes a feeling of decadent, sweeping grandeur.
The overgrown, forgotten gardens with their silenced fountains add to the sense that clocks simply stopped one day back in 1989. The rooms themselves, however, short on modern amenities and marred with sorely outdated deep-blue shag rugs from the final days of decline, hint at the kind of money and work that would be needed to make the facility hospitable to present-day guests.
March thinks it would be worth the investment. She insists that the hotel tells us something about where we come from and, hence, where we are going. It recalls a time of important growth when Los Angeles evolved from a Victorian, 19th century provincial burg into a cosmopolitan city of elegance and sophistication, she believes.
“Do we really need more places for people to shop?” she asks. “Is this what we have become? Yes, we need more schools, but what are we teaching the children inside them? That their history is expendable?”
Howard Miller, chief executive of the LAUSD, says we are about to find out. “The possibilities for delay are narrowing, and we’ll be in possession of that property somewhere between six to nine months from now,” he said.
