First, because of what happened there 40 years ago today, it was a crime scene. Then it became evidence in a murder trial. The passage of time eased it from a place of horror to a place in history. And then bureaucracy consigned it -- most of it -- to a landfill.
On California's primary election night in 1968, when Robert F. Kennedy walked from the joyous, luminous ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel into the kitchen pantry, and into the range of an assassin's gun, he walked from America's future into its sorry, bloody past.
What about that place, the hotel pantry, where history was unmade and remade in a moment?
The assassination turned out to be the last notable chapter of the storied and usually gloried Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, just west of downtown. George Washington didn't sleep there, but Winston Churchill did, and Albert Einstein and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nikita Khrushchev, sulking when he wasn't allowed to go to Disneyland.
But time went by, and the chic hotels went west, and in 1989 the Ambassador closed. Donald Trump wanted to extend his edifice complex to L.A. and bought the place. The school district said it needed the property for schools, but then changed its mind in favor of something called the Belmont Learning Center downtown, and we all know how that turned out. A quarter-billion wasted dollars later, back the LAUSD came to the Ambassador.
The Los Angeles Conservancy moved in front of the wrecking ball to try to preserve what it could. Imagine studying American history within the very walls where Richard Nixon wrote the "Checkers" speech that saved his political bacon.
But the Kennedy family pretty much wanted the place razed and the ground sown with salt. Coupled with the LAUSD's desperate need for classrooms, it was adios, Ambassador. The first of the three new schools on the property is supposed to open 15 months from now.
So where is the pantry now?
After the preservationists' lawsuits and the environmental impact reports, the LAUSD agreed to pluck it out and maintain it intact. But the LAUSD's senior project manager, John Kuprenas, told me that an engineer said no way. "Hold the bus," is what Kuprenas told me the engineer said. "This plan looks kind of iffy." The fear was that if the district "tried to take it out in a mass, it'd all completely crumble," Kuprenas said.
