Ambassador Hotel

The Los Angeles Board of Education narrowly voted Tuesday to build a $318-million school for 4,200 students on the site of the historic Ambassador Hotel, once frequented by celebrities and politicians and the site of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. The plan for the Ambassador, approved on a 4-3 vote, was backed by schools Supt.

It is the hotel that hosted the movie industry's salad days, where the stars mixed with business tycoons, politicians and worldly blue bloods. Royalty from Africa, queens from Europe and Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt through Lyndon B. Johnson all stayed at the Ambassador Hotel when they were in Los Angeles. Marion Davies once rode a horse through the Ambassador lobby to amuse her lover, William Randolph Hearst.

A coalition of preservationist, civic, labor and entertainment industry groups on Thursday turned up the heat on Los Angeles school officials to save the historic Ambassador Hotel while transforming it into a complex of badly needed campuses. The newly formed A+ (Ambassador Plus) Coalition called on the Los Angeles Unified School District to preserve all of the long-closed landmark's main building, plus its storied Cocoanut Grove nightclub.

Hollywood would call it The Long Goodbye. Some in the Wilshire district would simply call it long-winded. Demolition of the landmark Ambassador Hotel to make way for a 4,200-seat campus is dragging on and on, they say, even though school officials have argued since the early 1990s that they desperately need its space for classrooms -- and need it quickly. The tear-down is in its fifth month -- and to many Wilshire Boulevard passersby and neighbors, there appears to be no end in sight.

It is a building lost in time, captured in black-and-white images and haunted by ghosts. Marilyn Monroe, Sammy Davis Jr. and F. Scott Fitzgerald all frolicked there. Joan Crawford and Bing Crosby were discovered there. And Robert F. Kennedy died there, on the floor of a pantry off the kitchen. Since the Ambassador Hotel closed Jan. 3, 1989, it has been a symbol of battles waged all over the city, about whether to preserve our past or prepare a different sort of future.

If you were looking for a case study in historic preservation in Los Angeles -- for first-year graduate students in urban planning, say, or an architecture critic new to the city -- it would be difficult to find one from any era as perfectly, agonizingly balanced as the debate over the Ambassador Hotel.

The two unmarked metal bins sitting in a storage lot in Los Angeles' garment district hold artifacts from one of the most shocking events in modern American history: equipment and fixtures from the pantry where Robert F. Kennedy was fatally wounded June 5, 1968. The 29 items from the now-demolished Ambassador Hotel, including chandelier lights, wainscoting and the ice machine behind which assassin Sirhan Sirhan may have hid, face an uncertain fate. Are they really the stuff of history?

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 historic Ambassador Hotel, which closed its doors in January, has been sold to an investment group headed by a New York developer, but the fate of the 68-year-old hotel, once an oasis for Hollywood's rich and famous, remained unclear Wednesday. Anglo-Wilshire Partners, a California general partnership, reached an agreement over the weekend to purchase the 23.

New plans for a $250-million pedestrian-oriented retail and entertainment complex on the site of the former Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles have been unveiled by developers, who were stung by criticism of an earlier, plainer proposal. A San Diego-based partnership is circulating revised plans to community leaders and city officials for Wilshire Center Marketplace, a 1-million-square-foot project that proponents hope will bring new life to a long-suffering stretch of Wilshire Boulevard.