Ambassador Hotel--a Site to Behold : Development: The fate of the Mid-Wilshire property is of keen interest to competing groups. Preservationists, school officials and businessmen all have ideas for use of the land.

Nathan Kaplan, an 82-year-old man with white hair and beard, has lived for 14 years across the street from the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles’ Mid-Wilshire district, and he has heard all sorts of proposals--from restoration to schools or office buildings--for the now-defunct hotel.

Last week, as he leaned stiffly on his cane after his daily walk on Wilshire, Kaplan was almost philosophical about the latest one--Donald Trump’s grandiose plans to replace the hotel with the nation’s tallest skyscraper.

“I hope I live that long to see what’s going to happen,” he said wryly.

He’s not the only one. The fate of the 23.5-acre site at Wilshire Boulevard and Alexandria Avenue is a matter of keen interest to an assortment of competing interests--preservationists who consider the 69-year-old, Spanish-style hotel, with its high-ceilinged, carved and gilt-painted rooms, one of the city’s most important landmarks; school board leaders who want the land for a much-needed high school, and neighborhood businessmen who consider the site’s redevelopment crucial to the revitalization of the flagging district.

And, of course, Trump.

“Decisions made for the Ambassador are going to severely impact that area, for the good or for the bad,” said Betty Peters, Wilshire Chamber of Commerce president. “We’re depending on it to bring a focus back to our area, and let it be the catalyst for what all of us hope to achieve.”

As the old hotel spiraled downward in the last two decades, like an aging star abandoned by once-adoring fans, it came to symbolize the lost heyday for that neighboring stretch of Wilshire Boulevard between Vermont and Western avenues.

Just as the hotel was once the gathering place for the rich and famous, the district around the Ambassador “at one time was the major financial district in the city,” said Howard Sadowsky, executive vice president of Julien L. Studley Inc., a commercial real estate firm.

“At one point,” he said, “it probably had more Fortune 500 companies than any other part of the city.”

This was one of the places where Los Angeles first started to develop in its linear, car-oriented form, in the 1920s. The city’s first luxury hotel--the Ambassador--as well as its first luxury apartment houses, several imposing churches, theaters and department stores lined up there.

First known as “Mid-Wilshire,” about two miles from the Civic Center, the name sticks even though it is a misnomer, and development has marched all the way down Wilshire’s 14-mile path to the Pacific Ocean.

As other sectors of the city became trendier, and were closer to freeways, a host of major companies such as IBM, Arco, Getty Oil, and Texaco moved out--to downtown, to Universal City, or other locales.

“It’s been at best moving sideways for many years,” Roger Olson, president of Dwyer-Curlett & Co., mortgage bankers located farther west on Wilshire, said of the district. “Sideways and somewhat declining, because of that drain of your higher-grade, name tenants.”

Sadowsky, citing leasing costs of $16 to $28 a square foot, compared to $22 to $32 a square foot downtown and $27 to $38 in Westwood or Beverly Hills, added: “Space sits in this market longer and at cheaper rental rates than probably anyplace else in the city.”

The ethnic composition in the neighboring large apartment houses also has changed, with both positive and negative effects. While an influx of Koreans revitalized a whole section to the south now known as Koreatown, the amount of poverty has increased among growing numbers of Latino families and the elderly.

“The need continues to grow, and there’s more and more people,” said James Pierson, senior pastor at the huge Wilshire Christian Church, the first house of worship built on Wilshire, in the mid-1920s.

“We had about 60 people on the porch this morning,” he said. They come for an almost daily distribution of free food.

The 12 churches in the district banded together to form Hope-Net a year and a half ago to jointly provide food, counseling and literacy instruction, and to seek more low-income housing. “Last year we did in the neighborhood of 270,000 meals,” Pierson said.

Crime along Wilshire Boulevard itself, however, is “minute, compared to MacArthur Park and the residential areas where we have intensive enforcement,” said Sgt. Mike Rangel of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division.

Some people believe the long-needed revitalization on Wilshire already has started. Grubb & Ellis broker Andrew Wilson, for example, notes that the office vacancy rate has dropped from 18% to 10% in the last year alone.

Attorneys, accountants, small advertising agencies, magazine publishers and consulates have offices there, in buildings that often have hedges or flowers, a lawn or fountains facing the street.

Korean investors have come north from Koreatown and started to buy along this stretch of Wilshire. Steven Ha, head of the Korean partnership, has purchased two properties, and renamed one--the former Texaco building--Korea Center. It is now leased predominantly to Korean businesses.

The Korean presence is a natural move from Koreatown, Ha said, and added of his $13.5-million purchase of the Texaco building:. “When I bought this building the price was lower than Olympic Boulevard and 8th Street.”

Said Linda Hedden, vice president of the Wilshire Chamber of Commerce board of directors: “It’s not depressed. It just hasn’t had the growth that the Westside and downtown has had.”

That’s where the Ambassador comes in--with the potential for creating something new. Trump has proposed, though vaguely, a development that could include a 125-story office tower, residential buildings and a hotel. On Monday, three days after a 125-story building was approved in Chicago, Trump said that his Los Angeles tower may rise even 300 feet higher.

“It will be a focal point, an attraction,” Hedden said. “The name Donald Trump is itself an attraction.”

“This would reverse the trend line of the last 10, 15 maybe 20 years, start turning it up,” Olson said.

“We’d get more traffic,” Lawrence Tolosa, the youthful looking manager of Via Mare, said hopefully.

His seafood eatery is located inside the domed brown “hat” of the old Brown Derby restaurant, across from the Ambassador. The landmark restaurant was torn down to make way for a mini-mall, but the hat incongruously rematerialized in a corner of the shopping complex. Inside the dome, Tolosa was virtually alone one recent weekday at lunch hour.

Wayne Ratkovitch believes the Trump project “has the possibility of bringing the kind of grandeur this boulevard deserves.” The tall, thin developer has renovated the Wiltern Theatre and Pellissier buildings in the district, and has spearheaded the efforts of the Wilshire Stakeholders Group, formed four years ago by business and community organizations. The group is seeking to create a “renaissance” in the neighborhood, which they call “Wilshire Center” instead of “Mid-Wilshire.”

While walking one day last week, Ratkovitch stopped to point out a blank-looking, 12-story building made of brick and glass, as a way of expressing how an upscale Ambassador redevelopment could affect the area.

“That’s a nice building,” he began diplomatically, “but it is a modest effort. That is not Library Tower, you see what I mean? I hope the Trump project would establish standards for development on Wilshire.”

The Stakeholders commissioned a $217,000 planning study, partly funded by the city and finished last year, that said: “The Ambassador site represents the single most critical property in Wilshire Center.” A development there would “become the anchor for Wilshire Center,” it said, “and a catalyst for the revitalization effort.”

But preservationists and school board members consider the Ambassador critical, too. Los Angeles Board of Education President Jackie Goldberg noted, “We’ve got 4,500 students from the Belmont and Los Angeles High School areas on buses every day because they can’t go to school in the neighborhood. We have to have a high school in this area.”

The alternative is to acquire “13, 15, 17 acres” elsewhere in the community, she added, “and then you’re talking about literally thousands of people displaced.”

Though the city has never formally designated the Ambassador a local cultural monument, “if that building isn’t a landmark I don’t know what is,” Los Angeles Conservancy Director Jay Rounds said, noting that the building has been declared eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

For decades after the Ambassador opened, it was the gathering place for movie stars such as Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks and John Barrymore, who lived there or partied at its famed Cocoanut Grove nightclub. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated inside the Ambassador in 1968.

Rounds does not want to see the building demolished, and said the preservationist group will keep fighting for “reuse alternatives.”

Some people are not so sure Trump’s announced redevelopment is feasible, or will happen.

“The basic costs of building a building today are much more that the rental rates there for leasing,” Sadowsky said.

“Sometimes,” Ha said, “people make a big point to publicize something and then nothing happens.”

Some neighborhood children had thoughts about the Ambassador, in whatever form a new development takes. Ralph Rodriguez, 13, and Juanus Smith and Engelbert Hernandez, both 15, can be found most afternoons on skateboards, swooshing along the walkways and sidewalks outside some of the district’s office buildings.

“I hope they make it rad,” Rodriguez said, “a good place to skate.”