Ambassador Hotel

The L.A. school board should reject the wishes of the group RFK-12, which is clamoring for the Ambassador Hotel's demolition ("Group Opposes Bid to Preserve Ambassador Hotel," Nov. 21). Despite RFK-12's shameless invocation of Robert F. Kennedy, its members' desire for new schools is entirely justified. But the board's obligation should be to both provide new schools and respect the history of Los Angeles. Demolition is forever, and history is not so permanent as RFK-12 might like to think.

There are few remnants left of the venerable Ambassador Hotel, the site of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy's shooting in 1968, after it was demolished to make way for the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools that opened last year. There's still the east wall, which was the location of the famed Cocoanut Grove nightclub. Designed by Pasadena architect Myron Hunt, the glitzy spot opened on New Year's Day 1921 and quickly became a Hollywood favorite. During its first decade, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson were frequent visitors.

June 5, 1968: Sirhan Sirhan fatally shot Sen. Robert F. Kennedy at 12:20 a.m. in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel. Kennedy was running for president, and the shooting occurred "only a few moments after he had made a victory statement after capturing the California Democratic presidential primary," The Times reported that day. "Shouts and screams filled the packed hall as the call went out over the public address system for a doctor," the newspaper said.

Last month his lawyer tried to convince a parole board that Sirhan Sirhan was a brainwashed hit man when he gunned down Sen. Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968. But handwritten notes purportedly from Sirhan, kept for 42 years by a Century City executive, suggest that his behavior was calculated and controlled as he waited to shoot the just-victorious presidential primary candidate in the hotel's kitchen pantry area. Michael McCowan was an investigator and the youngest member of Sirhan's defense team in 1969 when the accused assassin sat down with a yellow legal pad and described his visit to a shooting range before his election-night trip to the hotel.

A hotel spokeswoman confirmed the news but would make no further comment. The announcement that the mid-Wilshire hotel was on the market was made by Los Angeles City Councilman John Ferraro. The Ambassador, owned by Schine Enterprises, opened in 1921 and became a well-known Los Angeles landmark. It is the hotel where Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1968.

A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge has ruled that the Los Angeles Unified School District can proceed with its plans to demolish most of the historic Ambassador Hotel and build a $318-million campus, attorneys said Monday.

The Ambassador Hotel, where Charlie Chaplin lived, Robert F. Kennedy died, Marion Davies rode a horse through the lobby and generations of stars entertained at the Cocoanut Grove lounge, closed its doors today. The last guests bade farewell to the 68-year-old Wilshire Boulevard landmark, an imposing building on 23 lush acres now in disrepair. It was one of the city's first luxury hotels, its palm-lined property exemplifying the California life style.

I found "Ideals Are Swell, but Classrooms Are Better" (April 14), about whether to preserve the historic Ambassador Hotel, misleading. Steve Lopez seemed to blame the existence of the building for the fact that a young boy was being bused out of his neighborhood. I blame the fact that the L.A. Unified School District is just now embarking on a comprehensive building program after not addressing our city's growth for more than 20 years. We know that the LAUSD is famous for quick fixes becoming costly blunders aimed at placating our (justifiably)

The Los Angeles Board of Education on Tuesday approved a $321-million contract with Hensel Phelps for the construction of middle and high schools and an auditorium on the site of the former Ambassador Hotel, as well as the development of playing fields and a park. Hensel Phelps had previously been awarded the contract to build a kindergarten through third-grade campus, parking structure, central utility plant and sidewalks, and other work at the site.

The price tag for a complex of schools at the site of the famed Ambassador Hotel has become the Los Angeles Unified School District's most expensive school project, now surpassing $578 million. The latest cost increase, approved Tuesday by the Board of Education, adds $6.6 million for expenses related mostly to safety and historic preservation at the complex for 4,200 students. The main campus of the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools will open this fall. Two small schools already operate on the back portion of the 24-acre Koreatown site.

As a skinny teenage busboy, Juan Romero knelt beside a mortally wounded Bobby Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel. On Saturday morning, more than 42 years later, he knelt again, this time beside RFK's grave on what would have been Kennedy's 85th birthday. Romero was wearing a suit for the first time in his life, saying it was the proper way to show his respect for a man whose memory he has tried to honor by living a life of tolerance and humility. Getting up the courage to visit Arlington National Cemetery was not easy for Romero, a construction worker from San Jose who has been haunted for decades by the events of June 5, 1968.

The start of the traditional school year Mondaywill also mark the unveiling of the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex, the much fought-over $578-million learning center that now occupies the site of the historic Ambassador Hotel. The campus, which comprises six independent schools, will unlock its doors to about 3,700 students as a maelstrom of issues buffets the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second-largest school system. The school's delayed Sept. 13 opening is the consequence of budget cuts that shortened the school year, while classes here and in other school systems will be larger because of teacher layoffs.

The excited young reporter called in from the airplane crash site, sure he had captured the essence of the tragedy. He couldn't wait to read the series of graphs he had lovingly crafted about the scene. But as the cub began to dictate his precious offering, the man on the other end of the phone cut him off. "Hold on a minute, Shakespeare," the rewrite man barked. "Before any of that, just give me the tail number." Eric Malnic was a newspaperman. And, as any good newspaperman knows, you need the facts first.

Along one edge of the old Ambassador Hotel site, where the Los Angeles Unified School District has been building a controversial collection of schools, there is a new park dedicated to the life and work of Robert F. Kennedy. Created by artists May Sun and Richard Wyatt and running parallel to Wilshire Boulevard, the park includes a series of quotations from Kennedy, who was shot and killed inside the hotel on a June night in 1968, and a few others. Among the lines by Kennedy is one that seems tailor-made to address the controversy that has followed the LAUSD's attempts, adamantly opposed by the Los Angeles Conservancy and other preservationists, to knock down Myron Hunt's 1921 hotel complex and replace it with a new campus costing more than $578 million, a streamlined but conservative piece of work by Pasadena firm Gonzalez Goodale Architects.

The price tag for a complex of schools at the site of the famed Ambassador Hotel has become the Los Angeles Unified School District's most expensive school project, now surpassing $578 million. The latest cost increase, approved Tuesday by the Board of Education, adds $6.6 million for expenses related mostly to safety and historic preservation at the complex for 4,200 students. The main campus of the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools will open this fall. Two small schools already operate on the back portion of the 24-acre Koreatown site.

In the early days of Hollywood, dreams of stardom began for aspiring actresses upon arrival from small-town America, when they took up residence at one of the neighborhood's romantic and exotic-sounding hotels such as the DuBarry, Las Palmas or Ravenswood. Jim McHugh, a photographer and third-generation Angeleno, pays homage to these landmark buildings, along with other disappearing landscape remnants, in his collection "Let's Get Lost: Polaroids From the Coast," at Timothy Yarger Fine Art in Beverly Hills.

When the space-age planned community of Century City displaced much of 20th Century Fox's backlot in the 1960s, the centerpiece of the office, retail and residential complex was an elegantly curved luxury hotel designed by a rising architect named Minoru Yamasaki. Now, plans to level the Century Plaza and erect two 50-story mixed-use towers have galvanized neighborhood groups and preservationists, whose determination to rescue the hotel has led to quiet negotiations with its owners.

Like a kindergarten teacher kneeling down to meet her 3-foot-tall charges at eye level, the new elementary school at the Ambassador Hotel site, set to open today, is impeccably attuned to the importance of a first impression. Designed by the Pasadena firm Gonzalez Goodale Architects, the school extends a friendly, crisply proportioned façade along 8th Street, on the southern edge of the sprawling 76-acre site over which the hotel long presided. Inside, the two-story school wraps 46 classrooms around a pair of generously sized courtyards.