After years of debate over the fate of the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles schools Supt. Roy Romer has selected a plan to save some historically significant elements of the hotel but demolish most of it in favor of a new kindergarten-through-12th-grade school on the 23-acre site.
The $318.2-million plan is intended as a compromise by Romer to appease increasingly vocal opponents of razing the hotel and find an expedient way to build a much-needed school in a neighborhood from which 3,800 students are bused elsewhere each day.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday September 18, 2004 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 52 words Type of Material: Correction
'A Star Is Born' actress -- A graphic in Sunday's Section A with an article about L.A. Unified School District's plans to save part of the Ambassador Hotel said the 1937 movie "A Star is Born" starred Judy Garland. Janet Gaynor was in the leading role. Garland starred in a 1954 version.
The 4,200-student school would be one of 160 that the Los Angeles Unified School District hopes to build in the next eight years to relieve overcrowding and move students off year-round schedules.
"This is a good compromise," Romer said Saturday. "It incorporates the values that we feel are essential and tries to preserve historic aspects, but it enables us to make a workable school community."
From Wilshire Boulevard, officials said, the view of the old hotel would be almost unchanged because of a facade that would duplicate the look of the original six-story hotel.
Portions of the Embassy Ballroom, where presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy gave his last speech in 1968 before he was mortally wounded in a hotel kitchen pantry nearby, would be saved and reinstalled in a library elsewhere on the property.
The Cocoanut Grove nightclub, where movie stars mingled and Hollywood's brightest stars performed, would be restored to its original Moorish design, abandoned years ago. It would become the school's main auditorium.
Most of the arcade of shops directly beneath it would be kept; the Paul Williams-designed coffee shop, among the more significant architectural elements of the property, would be preserved as a teachers lounge, and other shops would serve as the entrance to a middle and upper school cafeteria.
Among the elements of the hotel to be demolished under the new plan are six large bungalows where such celebrities as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rudolph Valentino and Albert Einstein once stayed, as well as the hotel's ornate, red-carpeted lobby.
The Board of Education will vote on the proposal in the next month or so. If its members approve and there are no legal impediments, officials said, the kindergarten-through-third-grade portion of the school could open as early as 2008, and the rest a year later.
