Ambassador Hotel

The Los Angeles Unified School Board approved Tuesday a settlement with local preservation groups, making way for the school district to tear down the Ambassador Hotel and replace it with a multi-school campus. In a 6-1 vote in closed session, the seven-member board agreed to make a $4.9-million contribution to a nonprofit organization that will oversee preservation efforts at 50 historic school buildings in the district.

In a rebuff to Mayor Tom Bradley, Manhattan developer Donald Trump said Monday that he may go ahead with plans to construct the world's tallest building in Los Angeles and may make it 300 feet taller than he originally suggested. Trump rejected a request by Bradley that he limit the scale of the development, planned for the site of the Ambassador Hotel. The developer also rejected Bradley's Friday suggestion that he help finance commercial developments in poorer areas of the city.

Los Angeles City Councilman Nate Holden paid an unannounced call on the school board Tuesday morning to plead against revival of a plan to build a high school on the former Ambassador Hotel site. In an appearance moments before the school trustees began a six-hour closed meeting that included discussion of the Ambassador site, Holden pitched a proposal by developer Donald Trump to build a commercial center on the abandoned Mid-Wilshire property.

She couldn't believe her eyes when she went back to the place she grew up. "My childhood is gone -- it just disappeared. I'm seeing the whole first 17 years of my life pass in front of me," Carlyn Frank Benjamin said. Benjamin was peering through a fence at rubble from the Ambassador Hotel, which has been demolished to make room for a school. Benjamin lived at the Ambassador between 1921, when it opened, and 1938.

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?

Mayor Tom Bradley has told developer Donald Trump that he must build 100 units of affordable housing elsewhere in Los Angeles if he wants to build a high-rise complex on the old Ambassador Hotel site. Trump's development proposal also conflicts with plans of Los Angeles school officials who want to build a high school on the Ambassador site.

You don't have to paint Fraser MacIver a picture. He's had a chance to draw his own conclusions about nostalgia in Los Angeles. MacIver is a Canadian artist who has spent the past month producing watercolor renderings of the defunct Ambassador Hotel--earmarked for demolition to make way for either a 125-story office tower or a new public high school. His paintings depict the 69-year-old hotel in its heyday.

A compromise plan for building badly needed schools on the site of the Ambassador Hotel won over a prominent friend Friday: state Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez. At a news conference at the jampacked Berendo Middle School, Nunez made it clear that his first choice would be for the Los Angeles Unified School District, which owns the property, to level the historic hotel altogether. But the Los Angeles Democrat said he had decided to embrace a plan backed by Supt.

When it comes to the fate of the famed Ambassador Hotel and the future of Wilshire Boulevard, mega-developer Donald Trump's New York money may talk loudly. But another voice--that of the UCLA-based Urban Innovations Group--already is having its considerable say in the contentious debate about the way Los Angeles should grapple with its growth.

It might just be the biggest architectural salvage project in Los Angeles. For more than 15 years, workers have been slowly taking apart the Ambassador Hotel. They've removed many of the fixtures, furniture and equipment from the Wilshire Boulevard landmark that once hosted Hollywood stars and world leaders and have sold them off, piece by piece. It started in 1991, about two years after the hotel closed.