Painter Finds Nostalgia Out of Fashion : Landmark: An artist documenting the defunct Ambassador Hotel is dismayed to learn that people care more about what may replace it.

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. They show the Ambassador of the 1920s and 1930s, when its romantic gardens beckoned Los Angeles’ elite and its famed Cocoanut Grove nightclub attracted Hollywood’s brightest stars.

MacIver has traveled the world sketching such landmarks. His paintings have been snapped up by local collectors--and occasionally by preservationists trying to protect the old structures.

But not in Los Angeles.

Here, MacIver discovered that property development is a major part of local culture. Residents are more accustomed to architectural renderings than to artistic ones. Some would rather see sketches of what the proposed high-rise or high school might look like than pictures of how the old hotel once looked.

The Ambassador’s current owners are not interested in acquiring MacIver’s artwork for posterity. Neither are school officials who hope to purchase the hotel site. Local conservationists who would like to preserve the Ambassador from either kind of development aren’t buying, either.

Onlookers who stop on the Wilshire Boulevard sidewalk to watch him paint say they have fond memories of dining and dancing at the Cocoanut Grove, MacIver said. Others sadly remember the hotel as the site of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination 22 years ago.

Instead of being outraged that the Ambassador may soon be demolished, many passersby seem caught up in the debate over what will take its place.

Some feel that the 23 1/2-acre site is best suited for a school that would serve up to 4,000 Mid-Wilshire students being bused to places such as the San Fernando Valley. Others favor New York financier Donald Trump’s proposal to build a combination high-rise office, hotel and retail project that could help rejuvenate the boulevard.

“People are pretty much generally resolved that it’s going to go,” MacIver said of the Ambassador.

“Life here is very fast. People here tend to try to be isolated from each other. . . . This is a place were the profit motive reigns supreme.”

MacIver, 30, admits that he began what he calls his “Long Last Look Series” with an eye toward selling the paintings for $600 to $1,000 each. The profit would finance his planned seven-month stay in Los Angeles.

A Save the Ambassador campaign has been launched by the Los Angeles Conservancy, which has sued to force the Los Angeles Unified School District to investigate using the existing building for classrooms at its proposed new high school.

When he asked if the conservancy was interested in buying one of his paintings, MacIver said, he was advised to advertise his pictures for sale in one of the group’s publications.

“We’re a lean-and-mean type of organization. We don’t buy things like that,” said Jay Rounds, the conservancy’s executive director. “If he wants to give it to us, we’d probably hang it on the wall.”

School officials feel the same way.

“Buy it for $600? No. If he were going to donate it, I’m sure we’d be delighted to have it and put it in the corridors of the new school,” said district spokeswoman Eva Hain. “Sad to say, it’s true: People aren’t that nostalgic about it. A lot of people see it as an old, rundown hotel.”

Officials of Trump Wilshire Associates, which bought the hotel property last year for $64 million, agree. “I’m sorry, no,” said the project manager, Stephen Lawler, when asked whether the firm would be interested in buying a painting.

Meantime, all three sides in the dispute are digging in.

Trump’s associates said last week that they have identified five alternative high school sites that would be cheaper for school officials to develop.

School board members moved forward this week with plans to finance purchase of the hotel property without state assistance. They hope to use money from bond issues to pay for the site, which they may have to acquire through condemnation proceedings. To get started, the district is borrowing $50 million from its workers’ compensation self-insurance fund.

Conservancy leaders are hoping to force Trump to preserve the old hotel if he emerges the winner. “It’s by no means a foregone conclusion the building is doomed,” Rounds said.