2/2006

No Vacancy at the Ambassador Hotel  

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.

 
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