Homes for the Taking, No Kidding
Once upon a time, in a not-so-long-ago Los Angeles, the two-story bungalows at the Ambassador Hotel were luxury homes away from home. Actors, rock ‘n’ rollers and even ordinary folk reveled in the buildings as big as mansions. They enjoyed panoramic views of the Wilshire district and a special kind of Southern Californian hospitality.
Now, these pieces of L.A. history are up for grabs -- and for free.
The Los Angeles Unified School District, which owns the Ambassador property, plans to build a school complex there and is trying to decide whether it should save the hotel’s main buildings. But it already has concluded that the six detached structures -- called bungalows despite their huge size -- -- must be moved or destroyed to make room for playing fields.
The district has offered to give them away to anyone who will move them. But so far, no takers have come forward, although four of the buildings were designed by Myron Hunt and two by Paul Williams, both architects of note.
The buildings, which range from 8,400 square feet to 61,000 square feet, are empty, asbestos-riddled and showing their age, some dating to the 1920s.
The school district recently placed ads announcing the giveaway.
“The bungalows have potential for adaptive preservation,” reads the ad in The Times. “LAUSD hopes that an appropriate relocation site and use can be identified.”
Only one person answered, and after learning what was involved, decided not to pursue the idea.
Still, Edwin van Ginkel, senior development manager for the district, said he was optimistic.
“I certainly hope that if not all, at least one example of each would find a home,” he said. “It’s not going to be cheap. But it will probably be less expensive than new construction. And you get something designed by Myron Hunt or Paul Williams.”
The bungalows’ fate is a sideshow to the main drama about the now-closed hotel.
The school district construction staff is trying to choose among four options for school construction on the 24-acre Ambassador site. An emotionally charged tug of war is underway between conservationists who advocate partially restoring the hotel for a campus and education activists pushing to knock down the main building to construct a school as quickly and cost-efficiently as possible.
But there is not much argument about the bungalows, which feature 14 to 70 rooms apiece. The district’s four construction options all require removing them to create more open space. Preservationists, focused on the larger issues, are not disputing that.
The Los Angeles Conservancy, which is fighting for the restoration of the main hotel structure, reluctantly agreed that the bungalows could go to keep open space, said conservancy Executive Director Linda Dishman.
She said that the bungalows appealed to visitors, famous and otherwise, who were staying longer than a week and wanted a more intimate venue than the main Ambassador, which boasted 1,000 rooms when it opened in 1921.
In a hotel known for catering to the whims of the wealthy and powerful, the bungalows offered additional privacy. Journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns, a frequent guest, secretly interviewed the duke and duchess of Windsor inside her bungalow suite, said Margaret Tante Burk, author of “Are the Stars Out Tonight?,” a photo history of the hotel.
Even a partial guest list for the bungalows reads like a “who’s who” of old Hollywood: Gloria Swanson, John Wayne, Tallulah Bankhead, John Barrymore and others.
Errol Flynn cavorted with a series of lovers there. F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were neighbors of Rudolph Valentino and his lover, the silent film star Pola Negri.
After Valentino’s death, Negri stayed on. Carlyn Benjamin, the daughter of the hotel manager at the time, recalled that she would often see Negri walking her pet cheetah underneath a pergola. “She took him down on a leash,” Benjamin said recently.
Bungalow guest Albert Einstein saw Jack Dempsey’s wife being pushed out of a first-floor window by the boxer after an argument. Einstein, according to Burk, told Dempsey that it was quite a way to get his attention.
Men recently separated from their wives stayed so often that in gossip columns of the late 1920s and ‘30s, “he’s checked into the Ambassador” became a euphemism for “the marriage is over,” said Cari Beauchamp, the author of books about early Hollywood.
In later years, the bungalows were a popular destination for politicians who did not want to run into constituents in the hotel lobby, and rock stars such as Mick Jagger trying to avoid groupies.
But while their pedigree might be remarkable, the bungalows themselves are not the best examples of their trailblazing architects’ work, said Aleks Istanbullu, an L.A. architect who recently taught a graduate class at USC on the reuse of the Ambassador parcel as a school site.
The Hunt bungalows, named Huerta, Reposa, Rincon and Siesta, were built in a Spanish Colonial style around the same time as the hotel. They feature wrought-iron balconies and richly colored ceramic tiles outside, and a maze of up to 36 rooms inside. The Williams buildings, larger and more modern, were built after World War II and include low-slung ceilings and large picture windows.
“They are significant in the sense that those architects are very well-known architects with major portfolios in Southern California,” Istanbullu said. “Are those bungalows a significant part of Paul Williams’ work? Not really. Their significance comes in the fact that they represent a particular lifestyle at a particular period.”
These days, ivy invades a second-story window of the Siesta bungalow. Paint throughout Williams’ Bungalow G is cracked and peeled. The building manager reports a flea infestation in the tunnel that connects one of the buildings to the main hotel and allowed the hotel staff to slip in and out.
It’s not, however, as if the bungalows have sat empty since the Ambassador Hotel closed in 1989. Like the hotel itself, they have spent a good part of the last decade standing in for other places. Police agencies use the bungalows to prepare for hostage situations. Movie shoots dress up bungalow rooms to stand in for almost anywhere.
On a recent visit, one set of staircases was painted a dirty hue of brown, transformed into a New York slum apartment. Another room had been furnished with blue walls and 1960s-era furnishings for a video shoot.
Potential takers must consider how to remove lead paint and asbestos, two common building materials at the time the bungalows were built.
The school district has offered to foot the bill for the removal of hazardous materials before the bungalows are moved. But that would require removing all of the stucco and paint, leaving a skeleton of a building, Van Ginkel said.
The district has estimated that it will cost several million dollars to remove asbestos from the entire Ambassador complex, but it has not broken out separate costs for the bungalows.
“We will pay for the abatement and do it on site and then they can move what’s left, or if they want to take care of abatement, they can move it as is and we would be OK with that,” Van Ginkel said.
Southern California is full of examples of architecturally significant buildings that have been moved, such as the row of Victorians now in Heritage Square just north of downtown L.A., and a 1921 Craftsman gem that recently was moved to the city of Orange’s Old Towne Historic District.
But anyone who agrees to take the bungalows faces some hefty, though still unknown, moving bills. Moving the house in Orange, which was less than 2,000 square feet, cost about $30,000. The much larger bungalows would have to be removed from foundations, carved up for transportation and then reassembled. “Usually, you don’t want to move the two stories very far,” said Jack Barber, a coordinator for American Heavy Moving and Rigging in Chino, a structural moving company. “Needless to say, the farther you move it, the more problems you start running into.”
