A Crisis Calls On the Ambassador

There’s something about the Los Angeles Unified School District that tends to numb outsiders, that renders the place inconceivable to people who don’t send their kids there. The problems--especially now that new management isn’t sugarcoating them--are so profound that listeners think you’re kidding: They’d have to flunk how many thousands if they ended social promotion? They’re busing 5-year-olds? To where? At what hour of the morning? What exactly do you mean, no lockers/textbooks/desks/working toilets/football fields?

The LAUSD story has come to resemble a long, awful version of that old “Tonight Show” bit where Ed McMahon would go, “How bad is it, Johnny?” And Johnny would reply, “Soooo bad that . . . “ and then launch into some hilarious yarn. Except nobody’s laughing. And in this latest sad twist, the joke is on outsiders as well as insiders. This week, the district is expected to announce that its problems will require the sacrifice of one of Southern California’s most historic landmarks, the old Ambassador Hotel.

To someone who didn’t grow up here, the Ambassador is little more than a big, pale-peach wreck on Wilshire Boulevard west of downtown L.A. Surrounded by aging apartments and Korean video joints, it’s a sagging has-been of a building, the Norma Desmond of Los Angeles’ architectural heyday. There’s scarcely a hint in the barbed-wire fence, the cracked facade, the brown lawn, the ranks of shaggy gray palm trees, that this once was the place to be seen for the Hollywood and political elite. This was where the first Academy Awards were held, where Nixon wrote the “Checkers” speech, where Marion Davies once rode a horse through the lobby to amuse William Randolph Hearst. This was the home of the famous Cocoanut Grove nightclub. In 1968, this was where Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert F. Kennedy.

In the ‘80s, the place was shuttered, only to pop up in 1990 as the site of a standoff between Donald Trump and LAUSD. The district wanted to seize the property through eminent domain and put a high school on the 23.5-acre site--perhaps renovating the hotel to house it; Trump wanted to scrape the lot and erect a 125-story high-rise. Both plans tanked with the real estate market. LAUSD turned to Plan B: the ill-fated Belmont Learning Complex. Trump’s group sued to force the district to take back the property, then revived plans to turn the Ambassador into a retail center, then stalled as Trump himself pulled out of the partnership. Throughout it all, the Ambassador sat in its time warp, enduring the fate of so many Southern California landmarks: rack, ruin and occasional use as a movie set.

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Meanwhile, the neighborhood, once swanky and high-toned, had morphed into one of the most densely populated immigrant entry points in L.A. The apartments that once housed starlets now were homes to Asian and Latino families. Families with children. Children who need schools.

And how bad is the need? So bad that kids there are not only packed into schools on year-round “tracks,” but they take classes in shifts. So bad that the neighborhood now has to bus out as many kids as it serves. So bad that it’s going to take at least six new kindergarten-to-third grade mini-campuses, plus a new middle school--if not a new high school--just to give every kid in that one sector a desk.

The campaign for new classrooms has created a whole new genre of angst. See, there’s no land that isn’t already in use. Most of the K-3 “primary centers,” as they’re called, are expected to end up on commercial property, but heart-wrenching battles already are shaping up where the district may have to relocate a couple hundred renters. And, as for the older kids--well, there is only one hunk of land big enough to accommodate them: the old Ambassador.

And the deal expected to be brought before the LAUSD board this week calls for what’s left of it to be split right down the middle. The Wilshire side of the lot is to go to Magic Johnson’s development firm for a multiplex theater, and the southern half is to become a middle school. Neither half, history notwithstanding, has much use for a has-been hotel, and compromise appears unlikely--the L.A. Conservancy wants renovation, but the Ambassador has seismic and asbestos issues, as well as that aura--so common to things Hollywood--of having perhaps always been temporary, somehow. So it seems Southern California is almost certain to lose this piece of itself. Which is sad, but perhaps what it takes to make it clear that LAUSD’s problems are everyone’s problems, and too real to be so widely and blithely unfelt.

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.