|
by Russell
Boniface
Associate Editor
Demolition
of the historic Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles was completed last month,
making way for construction of three new city schools on the site. In
a final show of reverence, hundreds of Los Angeles residents, including
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and movie stars Diane Keaton and Nicholas
Cage, gathered on February 2, across from the rubble, to remember the
Ambassador Hotel as a site of past celebration and tragedy.
The Ambassador Hotel, built in 1921, was the hot spot for movie stars
during the “golden era” of film, and a popular stopover for
many U.S. presidents. But the hotel had the ignominious distinction of
being the site of the 1968 Robert F. Kennedy assassination, the most
pivotal moment in its history. The Ambassador closed in 1989, and preservationist
groups that considered it both a Los Angeles and American landmark fought
for its survival.
That didn’t save it from the wrecking ball.
In 2001, the Los Angeles Unified School District bought the deteriorating
property. The L.A. Conservancy and the Art Deco Society tried to convince
the school district to declare the Ambassador Hotel a city landmark,
restore it as a resort hotel, or reuse it for the schools. The school
district instead voted in 2004 to raze the famous 1,000-room hotel in
favor of rebuilding. Only the remains of a coffee shop, designed by architect
Paul Williams, and the Cocoanut Grove, once a posh Hollywood nightclub
and home to early Academy Award ceremonies, will be preserved and reused.
Mediterranean architecture goes Hollywood
The H-shaped Ambassador Hotel was composed of two six-story wings connected
by a horizontal seven-story main building. There were six adjacent
two-story bungalows in the back, connected by a tunnel. The 24-acre
complex was designed by renowned Los Angeles architect Myron Hunt,
who also designed the Rose Bowl Stadium, Caltech, the Pasadena Library,
Occidental College, the Hollywood Bowl amphitheater, and the Huntington
Hotel in Pasadena—all of which are still standing. When the Ambassador
opened, it was advertised as “the house of a thousand rooms.” Hunt
wanted to give it a Mediterranean resort feel, recalling the charm
of Italian villas, surrounded by smaller bungalows on a vast landscape.
Mediterranean Revival-style architecture, very popular at the time in
southern California, was used for the Ambassador’s design and featured
many of the style’s signature characteristics: rectangular floor
plans; symmetrical facades; stucco walls; a low-pitched, clay-barrel
tile roof; and double-hung windows. A palm-tree laden courtyard completed
the hotel’s exterior style. Hunt and Williams gave it an elegant
interior, with Italian stone fireplaces, hand-crafted tile floors, wide
marbled corridors, an expansive, red-carpeted lobby replete with columns
and fountains, and of course the grand, high-ceiling, marbled ballrooms.
A Moroccan motif was used for the Cocoanut Grove nightclub, complete
with Arabian doors and artificial palm trees left over from the filming
of Rudolph Valentino’s 1921 film “The Sheik.”
The Ambassador was built on a hill outside of downtown L.A. The construction
cost was $5 million, which was hefty at the time. The Los Angeles and
Wilshire Chambers of Commerce planned the hotel as an impetus for development
north of downtown. Wilshire Boulevard eventually was born, which had
been a dirt road before the Ambassador opened, surrounded by bean and
barley fields. The hotel, originally called “The California,” was
changed to the “Ambassador” after getting much-needed construction
funding from the Ambassador Hotels chain.
Over
time, the Ambassador’s ritzy, palm-decorated Cocoanut Grove,
with its eye-catching blue ceiling and red and green drapes and chairs,
saw an endless generational stream of Hollywood firepower. Early on,
it was Rudolph Valentino, Clark Gable, and Joan Crawford; then came Jimmy
Stewart, Bing Crosby, and Judy Garland; the ’50s saw Frank Sinatra
and Marilyn Monroe; and in the ’60s it was Sammy Davis Jr., Diana
Ross, and Barbara Streisand. There was a long succession of visiting
presidents—seven
in all: Hoover through Nixon. Foreign heads-of-state and royalty dropped
in, as well. Six Academy Award ceremonies were held at the Ambassador
during the 1930s and early 1940s. Albert Einstein and Howard Hughes called
it home at one time.
One of America’s darkest days
In 1968, following his California Primary victory speech, Robert F. Kennedy
was shot in a pantry off of the hotel’s Embassy Ballroom. He
died 25 hours later. There is now a dispute as to what to do with the
aging remains of the pantry: the Kennedy family wants everything destroyed
and believes such remnants have nothing to do with Robert F. Kennedy’s
legacy, as well as concerns that pantry artifacts, such a food-warming
table, an ice machine, a closet frame, tile, lamps, and pieces of the
wall will wind up as morbid souvenirs. But the school district says
it is legally bound to preserve the pantry items under terms of the
demolition plan passed by the city. Last month the salvaged pieces
went into storage.
Many believe that the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968 coincided
with the beginning of the Ambassador Hotel’s demise, hastened by
the decline of its surrounding neighborhood. By the 1970s, gangs and
drugs took over the neighborhood near the hotel. Sammy Davis Jr. tried
to save the Cocoanut Grove in the mid-’70s, but with the disco
decade in full force, the old-style swing was way past its prime. The
hotel itself, despite remodeling in the ’70s, was seen as dated.
In 1988, the Ambassador’s windows and doors were boarded, and the
building put on the market. When there were no buyers, it was condemned.
Brief revival
In 1989, English and Irish investors purchased the hotel. Donald Trump
bought 20 percent from them and proposed building a 125-story tower
on the property, but that was later dismissed. One year later, the
Los Angeles Unified School District seized the site through eminent
domain. Legal wrangling ensued for a decade, but in the interim the
city had control and the hotel had a resurgence as a popular film and
photography location. Even its Embassy Ballroom was rented out for
film-noire-themed parties.
But the mid-1990s “golden era” retro boom, due in part to
hit movies like L.A. Confidential and the brief return of swing and ballroom
dancing, didn’t stick around. Although film companies still occasionally
shot scenes there up until 2004, the hotel, with no regular upkeep, became
a fenced-in eyesore and suffered from the sure signs of age: a peeling
façade, a collapsing infrastructure, asbestos, and weeds growing
in its courtyard. Eventually, methane gas was discovered underground
and the site was considered toxic. Like an aging character actor, it’s
time had come.
The end of a golden-age monument
The Los Angeles Unified School District finally won control of the hotel
in 2001 for $76.5 million but then battled with the L.A. Conservancy
and the Art Deco Society preservationist groups. A heated debate raged
about adaptive reuse. “From the day the Los Angeles Unified School
District acquired the Ambassador, the Conservancy and its partners
stated clearly that we supported a school at the site.” says
Roland A. Wiley, president of the Los Angeles Conservancy, on the group’s
Web site. “There is a desperate need for school facilities in
this neighborhood, with thousands of kids being bused for hours each
day to distant campuses.”
A task force studied whether the building could sustain an earthquake,
and it was determined that a seismic retrofit was actually possible,
but at immense cost. The hotel rooms, some thought, could convert easily
into classrooms. Upon further review, the corridors were thought too
narrow for a school and the windows too small. In the end, none of this
was practical, cheap, or even desired by the school district. A state-of-the
art facility was the plan. Perhaps to appease preservationists, a new
facade mimicking the old hotel is part of the design. Demolition began
last year.
“Our fight to preserve the Ambassador Hotel was never just about
saving bricks and mortar, or about sentimentally commemorating the Ambassador’s
past,” says Wiley. “It had always been about looking forward—about
using history to build a better school for our kids, and a better community.”
The future of the site
The school district plans for three new schools on the Ambassador site:
an elementary school, scheduled to open in 2008; and a middle school
and high school, both scheduled to open in 2009. The $318.2 million
plan is meant to ease severe overcrowding in the district’s schools.
A memorial park honoring Robert Kennedy is also planned for the site.
The Embassy Ballroom, where Kennedy gave his California Primary victory
speech in 1968, was torn down, and a library will be built in its place.
The ballroom’s ceiling was saved and will be reinstalled in the
new building.
The
Cocoanut Grove nightclub will be saved to serve as a large auditorium/lecture
hall, and the coffee shop will become a teacher’s lounge. (Ironically,
the Cocoanut Grove is the only structure that was not actually original,
as it was completely redone in the 1970s.) To make room for new athletic
fields, the six bungalows—where the rich and famous once stayed—had
to be removed. Evidently there was no interest in saving them, since
the district offered to give them away to anyone who would move them.
The bungalows ranged from 8,400 square-feet to 61,000 square-feet and
were designed by both Hunt and Williams. The
Los Angeles Times even ran
an ad: “The bungalows have potential for adaptive preservation.” There
were no takers; even the L.A. Conservancy backed-off. The bungalows were
ultimately demolished.
The Los Angeles Unified School District agreed to establish a new “Historic
Schools Investment Fund,” which will operate as a permanent endowment
and provide grants to historic schools in its district for repair, restoration,
and conservation of important historic features. The $5 million fund
includes $4.9 million from the school district and a commitment to raise
an additional $100,000 by the Conservancy and other community/preservation
groups. The fund will operate as a nonprofit organization.
Wiley says the L.A. Conservancy can take solace in the knowledge that
it did all that could be done to preserve the Ambassador and that lessons
can be learned from the struggle. “This effort has allowed us to
create a breakthrough agreement with the Los Angeles Unified School District
that will help preserve dozens of other historic schools throughout Los
Angeles,” he says.
Copyright 2006 The American Institute of Architects.
All rights reserved. Home Page
|
|
|
Did
you know . . .
There goes the neighborhood. The Ambassador Hotel was located right across
the street from the former site of another former Hollywood landmark, the
Brown Derby, the restaurant shaped like a hat. The Brown Derby, too, is
gone now, except for its domed hat, which sits awkwardly atop a nondescript
strip-mall.
The Ambassador Hotel had been used in many movies before its closure,
perhaps the most memorable being The Graduate, in which The Ambassador’s
lobby, reception desk & Palm Bar are all shown extensively when a
young Dustin Hoffman conducts his affair with Mrs. Robinson (Ann Bancroft).
The hotel was called The Taft in the film.
|
|