CITIZINE NEWS
Demolition Begins on Ambassador Hotel
Los Angeles landmark to be torn down to build three schools.

By Thom White

LOS ANGELES June 5, 2005 -- The L.A. Unified School District (LAUSD) has begun demolishing the historic Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard. A pesky lawsuit by the L.A. Conservancy protects the main building at the moment, but according to the L.A. Times (4/2/05), workers are now dismantling the main pool, tearing up driveways and parking areas, uprooting trees, removing key furniture, and have destroyed a honeymoon cottage.

LAUSD plans to destroy the entire Ambassador Hotel complex in the fall of 2005 and build in its place a 4,000 seat government-run education facility for youths ages 6 to 18. In a 4-3 vote in October 2004, the school district’s Board of Supervisors authorized the present plan to level almost the entire hotel.

The $318 million project to construct these new schools on the grounds of the Ambassador is part of a larger $3.3 billion school construction spending spree. A June 2003 report by the LAUSD stated that keeping the 6-story main building as part of the new schools would cost an additional $95 million. The L.A. Conservancy believes preserving this powerful L.A. symbol is worth the cost, and has singlehandedly given voice to a popular sentiment that the Ambassador Hotel is important to the city and should not be demolished. The main hotel building that the L.A. Conservancy is attempting to save occupies about 6 acres on the 23-acre lot.

The LAUSD calls its plan for a three-section government training complex “Heritage K-12” because the plan saves from destruction certain elements of the original Ambassador. The coffee shop addition from the 1940s and the Cocoanut Grove night club will be preserved; the ceiling from the fabulous Embassy Ballroom will be salvaged as well and “reapplied” to a room in one of the new schools. But the Conservancy reports with dismay a primary aspect of the Heritage K-12 plan: “The six-story main building would be entirely demolished … Even worse, following demolition, the District would erect a large, six-story replica of the hotel’s former façade as the front wall of the new school.”

The L.A. Conservancy is challenging the LAUSD’s final Environmental Impact Report (EIR) from 2004, claiming the school district failed to provide financial materials on alternative plans for the schools which would have included preservation of the hotel’s main building. Opponents of demolition have long claimed that LAUSD cost estimates for preserving and restoring the main building were inflated. And so the Conservancy has filed a lawsuit with the pro bono assistance of Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher, while other groups in the Conservancy’s coalition are being assisted by Attorney Joseph C. Markowitz.

Why is the Ambassador worth saving?

The Ambassador Hotel is located at 3400 Wilshire Boulevard, a couple blocks east of Normandie. The hotel has hosted movie stars, producers, presidents, and famous figures from all over the world. The Ambassador was constructed from 1919 to 1921 (among beanfields), and is the work of architect Myron Hunt, who also designed the Rose Bowl, Huntington Library, and much of Occidental College in Eagle Rock. The coffee shop portion (which the LAUSD has agreed to preserve) was added after the Second World War and was designed by prolific L.A. architect Paul R. Williams.

Ishidoro.com describes the origins of the Ambassador:

The Ambassador’s site was a part of Reuben Schmidt’s dairy farm until 1902. That year, Schmidt sold a 23 acre section to Ella Crowell. She then sold half of the land to the Los Angeles Pacific Railway Company for the purpose of constructing an interurban railway. The railway plans did not materialize, and in 1919, both Mrs. Crowell and the railway company sold their halves to the hotel company. Construction of the Ambassador began in June of 1919.

Ground was broken, and construction started on the estimated $5 million hotel. Then, $5 million was an exhorbitant amount of money to spend on such a project. The Los Angeles and Wilshire area Chambers of Commerce devised the idea of a hotel as a civic endeavor. In 1919, the Wilshire area was considered to be too far from developed areas to have much value. In addition, it was believed that Los Angeles would develop in an eastward movement, instead of towards the sea. The placement of the Ambassador was the major impetus behind the development of Wilshire Boulevard into one of L.A.’s main arteries. The hotel was originally called “The California”, but its name was changed to the “Ambassador,” after S.W. Straus stepped in with much-needed construction funding. The hotel then became a part of the Ambassador Hotels chain, which included hotels in Atlantic City, New York, Santa Barbara, and The Alexandria in Los Angeles.

The Ambassador was the site of the Cocoanut Grove which, according to Gary Wayne (seeing-stars.com), was “the quintessential Hollywood nightclub” from the start:

When it opened in 1921, the Cocoanut Grove instantly became a mecca for movie stars and star-gazers. The famous artificial palm trees which decorated the club’s interior were left over from Rudolph Valentino’s 1921 movie “The Sheik.” The Grove was virtually synonymous with Hollywood glamour -- actresses such as Joan Crawford (“Mildred Pierce”), Carole Lombard (“My Man Godfrey”), and Loretta Young (“The Bishop’s Wife”) were reportedly discovered while dancing at the popular nightclub.

Marilyn Monroe signed up with the Blue Book Modeling Company at their office in the Ambassador. Both Bing Crosby and Merv Griffin began their singing careers at the Grove. The Cocoanut Grove was also the site of many of the early Academy Award ceremonies. Oscar statuettes were handed out here on several occasions during the 1930’s and early 1940’s.

With its Mediterranean styling, tile floors, Italian stone fireplaces and semi-tropical courtyard, the Ambassador enchanted guests for over six decades. Long time residents at the hotel included Howard Hughes, Jean Harlow, John Barrymore and Gloria Swanson, and every U.S. President from Herbert Hoover to Richard Nixon stayed there, as did British royalty. Nixon wrote his Checkers speech here in 1952.

Decline and Demolition

The Ambassador and Cocoanut Grove night club remained hot spots for the rich and famous into the 1960s, but the public relations disaster with Robert Kennedy’s murder in the hotel kitchen in the summer of 1968 would spell trouble.

By the time the Ambassador closed shop in 1989, glitz and glamour in L.A. had moved further west to WeHo, B.H., and beyond. The area around the Ambassador (“Mid-Wilshire”) made a transition during the 1970s and ‘80s to become the nice part of Koreatown, a section of L.A. that sprouted up around Olympic & Western with the first big wave of Korean immigrants to California in the decades after the Korean War (1950-53). The Ambassador boasted hosting every U.S. president from Herbert Hoover to Richard Nixon. The absence of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan from the guestlist was a clear sign of the hotel’s decline.

By the 1980s, fire code requirements had changed and new earthquake safety standards were taking effect, improvements that would have cost millions of dollars. Funds were not available for the necessary upgrades, so the hotel was closed. The Schine family, who owned the hotel for about 50 years, sold it for $64 million, which was used to pay off accrued debt.

* * * * *

Soon after closing, the hotel was purchased at an auction by Wilshire Center Marketplace (WCM), and in 1990, T.V. star Donald Trump joined the partnership. After taking control, Trump’s group began negotiations to sell the property to the LAUSD, and the LAUSD agreed to purchase most of the land in the early 1990s. Trump’s group was given $48 million as a deposit, although the deal was not finalized. There was talk of splitting the land into a new school and retail space.

Following looting and mayhem in late April 1992, L.A. property values declined. In late 1993, the school district balked at paying the higher previous value for the land, and there was a chance the deal would fall through. While WCM sued for the full previous value of the hotel property, Trump announced pie in the sky plans to demolish the Ambassador and construct a 125-story skysteeple to stand taller than the Library Tower, and dwarf every structure on Wilshire. Funding for this plan did not materialize, and in 1998, Donald Trump pulled out of the Ambassador redevelopment project with the hotel still in limbo.

Through all this talk, WCM maintained portions of the property and rented it out for film shoots, private parties, and parking. By 2000, there was an agreement at last to sell the land to the school district, and now the LAUSD simply needed to wrangle up public approval for more debt to pay for it.

Investors in WCM appear to have made a small killing off the destruction of the Ambassador Hotel. The business plan as originally envisaged in 1989 has come to fruition. The plan: have political connections in the L.A. government (in this case, the L.A. public school district) push through democratically approved school bond measures that place new debt and interest payments on the public’s back, and then electronically-transfer this newly minted education money straight into WCM’s scattered bank accounts.

A school bond measure passed in November 2001 provided the necessary influx of money for the LAUSD to pay off Trump’s cronies (to the tune of $110 million), and to finance construction of three new schools on the land. In December 2001, the LAUSD closed escrow on this prime 23-acre plot, and took full title to the property.

Since the LAUSD purchased it, most maintenance on the Ambassador has ceased, and the site has decayed in preparation for destruction. In October 2004, the LAUSD Board of Supervisors voted 4-3 to raze most of the Ambassador Hotel and build schools using the funds from the 2001 bond measure.

Part II: The RFK Assassination & The Ambassador

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