School Board Adopts Plan to Buy Ambassador Hotel

The Los Angeles Board of Education on Monday formally approved a plan to buy the newly sold Ambassador Hotel and build a new 2,000-student high school.

In order to acquire the historic 23.5-acre property, however, the district would have to purchase it from Anglo-Wilshire Partners, the investment group that agreed to buy the property for an undisclosed price earlier this month from the J. Myer Schine family.

District officials said they will attempt to buy the property, which has been valued at between $50 and $100 million. But if the investment group refuses to sell, the district is prepared to begin legal proceedings to claim the property through eminent domain, according to district real estate director Robert J. Niccum.

Representatives of the Schine family and Anglo-Wilshire Partners could not be reached for comment late Monday.

However, representatives of the Los Angeles Conservancy and the Wilshire Chamber of Commerce, who spoke at a Board of Education meeting Monday night, said they would strongly oppose the district plan.

The district’s current plans call for demolishing the 68-year-old hotel, Niccum said. The hotel buildings do not meet earthquake safety standards, and it would be too costly and impractical to bring the structures into conformity with current building standards and convert them into classrooms, he said.

Under an agreement between the city of Los Angeles and the Schine family, however, plans to destroy the Ambassador would require city approval, even though the hotel has not been designated a historic landmark.

The Ambassador, which closed its doors last January, was home to the famous Cocoanut Grove nightclub and, in its heyday, served as an elegant backdrop for Hollywood celebrities, movie moguls, royalty and U.S. presidents. New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated there on June 6, 1968, the night he won the California Democratic presidential primary.

The property has been on the market for five years. Two years ago, the school board decided to explore the possibility of acquiring the land and ordered an environmental impact report. The report, which was presented Monday night, showed few significant effects, such as increased traffic.

Under state law, any public agency, such as a school district, has the right to stake a claim to private property under eminent domain, if it can prove its need. The school district could take the matter to court and ask a jury to decide what a fair selling price for the property would be.

The school district is eager to purchase the property because open space is scarce in Los Angeles. In recent years, the district has been forced to evict hundreds of renters and homeowners in order to clear away sufficient property on which to build new schools.

Board President Jackie Goldberg said a recent district study showed that 8,000 to 9,000 high school-age students currently live within a nine-block radius of the Ambassador site. Many of them are unable to attend neighborhood schools because they are too crowded. Those students are bused to more distant campuses, with some, Goldberg said, traveling as far as El Camino High School in Woodland Hills.

“We need a high school in that area desperately,” she said, “not for future growth but for the kids who are already there and riding the bus. It is a good site in the right location.”

The district estimates that it will cost $100 million to acquire the Ambassador land and build the high school, she added.

Board member Mark Slavkin cast the sole vote against the project. He said that he felt uncomfortable “giving my blessings” to the project without more time to study it.

Anglo-Wilshire Partners has proposed developing the Ambassador site as a mixed-use, residential-commercial project that could include a hotel.

Wayne Ratkovich, chairman of a group representing property owners in the Wilshire Corridor, which has been working on a development plan for the area, said the school district’s purchase of the Ambassador property would “undermine good and responsible development” of the site.

“I think you will find consensus in the neighborhood that the Ambassador Hotel site is a key and instrumental property in the future of the area. . . . The school district has been like a bull in a china shop,” he said, ignoring other, less-expensive sites in the vicinity that could serve its needs as well as the hotel property.