HISTORY AT A PRICE : If You’re Looking for L.A.’s Past, You’ll Find It Where the Auction Is.

Some cities make a big deal about their heritages--continually sandblasting antique buildings back to their pre-pollution colors, turning great old mansions into museums, that whole tiresome respect-for-the-past thing. We honor the past differently: We sell it off in pieces.

My first sense of this phenomenon came some years back when two major movie studios, Fox and MGM (well, it used to be a major), held massive auctions. They were clearing their back lots, and except for a few soundstages and corner offices, everything had to go. So props, costumes, set dressings, furnishings, even Judy’s Oz slippers ended up not in some musty museum but in the hands of affluent collectors. It’s the L.A. way of recycling: Collectors are our bacteria, breaking down old matter into building blocks for new matter.

I was reminded of this process a few weeks ago. While taking a long-cut home from downtown, I happened to stop by the Ambassador Hotel, where a liquidator was busily selling off, piece by piece, the Ambassador Hotel. Beds, bedspreads, chairs, tables, hotel TVs (always your best buy in electronics), dishes, serving carts, the silver domes that waiters whisk off your entree plate with a flourish, torn and stained tablecloths with the barely visible crest of the Schine family embroidered on them--it was time, as they say in the stereo ads, to blow it out to the bare walls.

The Ambassador had been the dowdy dowager of Mid-Wilshire for years, but it was once central to this city’s social life. Hard as it may be to imagine that movie stars ever stayed anywhere east of Western, they once flocked to the Ambassador. Generations of prom couples danced the night away at the Cocoanut Grove. Unlike the new hotels that have proliferated to its west, the Ambassador not only had status, it had grounds.

The first time I set foot in the place was years after its prime, when Sammy Davis Jr. attempted to revive the nightclub by kicking out resident bandleader Freddy Martin, building a new chandeliered entrance to the place and renaming it, in awkward ‘60s-speak, the Now Grove. “Now,” it turned out, was then. In recent years, the Grove has been, like so many other disused places in L.A. (except for old studios), mainly employed as a shooting location. Many of those Dick Clark-produced specials that look as if they were taped at some mysterious dinner were shot at the Grove.

The studio auctions weren’t particularly spooky. You were just helping to make the world safe for more condos. But at the Ambassador garage sale, ghosts peered over your shoulder as you picked through the cut-rate crockery. It was in the kitchen entryway of this hotel, after all, that Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Now you could buy some, or all, of that kitchen. The people who last year took home a square inch of sod from the late Comiskey Park in Chicago were also bringing to the hearthside a mental hologram of some great play by Minoso or Aparicio. So, if you lugged home the hotel’s big freezer, were you not also taking in the shadow of Sirhan Sirhan, perpetually hiding behind the professional-grade appliance?

It’s in the nature of things that once-fabulous hotels grow seedy and die. Less-fabled pieces of L.A. fall off the tree all the time. On the west side of La Cienega, just north of Wilshire, is a large vacant lot. Maybe they’re using it for parking now, or it may be growing its late-summer crop of weeds. But for years, it was the site of Ollie Hammond’s, where you could count on getting a charcoal-broiled steak, a salad and a hefty baked potato at any time. It was food that was serviceable by day, but a miracle at 4:30 in the morning. The place had plush leather banquettes and a menu full of wonderful hyperbole--one item was the “world’s finest small steak.”

I mourn the end of Hammond’s, and I’m uneasy about the fate of the Ambassador. Will the squabbling parties to the hotel site--the L.A. school district and a certain financier--unite to build Donald Trump High? But the passing of these landmarks tells us that L.A. is growing up. A city acquires a sense of history when you can pass a place and say, “This used to be the Ambassador Hotel.” Until now, all you could say was “This used to be a bean field.”

In a few decades, if you stay healthy, you can count on attending the sell-off of the artifacts of the Beverly Hills Hotel, or Mortons, or God forbid, The Times. You can tell your kids, “Here’s the fax machine where Harry Shearer’s column used to come in, usually late.” And your kids can say, “Who?”