Sure, Trash It; It's Only a Part of Our History

Los Angeles has embarked on a course so stupid no one would believe it, were it not as predictable as it is dumb. To turn the old Ambassador Hotel into a high school, Los Angeles schools Supt. Roy Romer has chosen, as the Associated Press put it, to "save some of the hotel's more notable features" and tear down the rest.

Miracles do happen, and Los Angeles Unified's crack construction team -- the one that brought you the Belmont Learning Complex fiasco -- could conceivably produce a project that balances heritage against the dire need for urban classrooms. But the likelier scenario is that officials will cannibalize a monument not only to Hollywood glamour but to a profound moment in Los Angeles and U.S. history -- the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. By severing the students from this legacy, Romer threatens to rob them of an experience that can only enhance their education. That most of the students at the future Koreatown campus stand to be poor and/or immigrants only accentuates the disservice.

The architectural distinction of the Ambassador, designed by Myron Hunt, with a coffee shop by Paul Williams, is not as indisputable as, say, the Bradbury Building. I like it, but then I'm not an architecture critic. But its value is really as a cultural icon: the Cocoanut Grove nightclub, where Bing Crosby crooned and Joan Crawford danced her way to a studio contract, the suites where presidents, kings and Albert Einstein stayed.

Los Angeles has long been known as a city that eats its architectural history. Some people like it that way. They say the destruction juices up the city's cultural vital signs. But there's another quintessentially Angeleno approach to preservation at play here: the McMonument.

A block or two from the Ambassador are the remnants of the original Brown Derby, the hat-shaped topper that gave what eventually became the definitive Hollywood Golden Age restaurant its charm and international cachet. The derby was taken from its original location on Wilshire Boulevard and perched ridiculously atop a mini-mall on a nearby side street. The only vantage point from which it could be recognized as a fantastical hat is a helicopter. The Brown Derby has ceased to be anything. Not a landmark, not a tribute, just an ugly bulge atop an undistinguished commercial strip.