New School to Occupy Hotel Site

The landmark Ambassador Hotel, where Hollywood stars danced away the Depression, where presidents stayed and where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, will be purchased by the Los Angeles Unified School District for a school, the Board of Education decided Tuesday.

The vote to buy the Wilshire Boulevard property for $76.5 million to relieve crowded campuses in the central city appears to end a decade of debate over the 23-acre site.

But the plan still faces potentially divisive negotiations with civic groups. Wilshire business interests want a retail center included in the project. And historical preservationists are determined to restore the once-illustrious hotel.

Board of Education President Caprice Young said the district has no firm plans for the campus yet. She said she phoned several political and business leaders Tuesday to request their participation in forming a plan.

“‘We will have a community meeting to look at the different possibilities for the site,” she said.

Young said she hopes the district can build a community-centered school that will help reduce the area’s dearth of parks and libraries.

Her overtures received a warm reception.

“We understand there is a need for a high school,” said Gary Russell, president of the Wilshire Center Chamber of Commerce. “We want to work with the school district and make a high school happen. The school just needs to be thought of in a more compatible way with the business community.”

Ken Bernstein, director of preservation issues for the Los Angeles Conservancy, said his group already has proposed plans for a 2,500-student high school that could be built inside the 80-year-old hotel, leaving room to spare for potential commercial development.

Young, however, said she will make no promises about including retail operations or housing in the project.

“It’s conceivable, but unlikely given the very high need for schools in the neighborhood,” she said.

Several nearby schools are filled beyond capacity and send hundreds of students who live in their attendance areas elsewhere. Among the most extreme cases are Cahuenga Elementary School, which buses out 1,300 students, and Virgil Middle School, which sends away 1,100.

School officials said they will consider alternatives for a high school, a middle school or a combination of all grade levels on the hotel site.

The district’s efforts to buy the Ambassador began shortly after the hotel closed in the late 1980s and was purchased by East Coast real estate magnate Donald Trump.

The school district stopped Trump’s plan to erect the world’s tallest building when it condemned the property in the early 1990s, paying Trump a $48-million deposit on the purchase. But as real estate values plummeted amid recession, the district got what it then thought of as a better deal on a former oil field just west of downtown.

The unfinished Belmont Learning Complex now stands on that property, abandoned by the board in January 2000 after the discovery that the hazardous gases there were inadequately studied before construction began.

In the meantime, the district sued Trump to regain its deposit. He bitterly fought the action, contending that he was owed compensation for delays that had made his project untenable.

The courts ruled in the district’s favor, but Trump’s successor in the venture, Wilshire Center Marketplace, couldn’t pay, having used the deposit to pay its debt.

By then, with Belmont in mothballs, the district decided once again to seek the Ambassador site for a school. At one point, it ordered a sheriff’s sale, a move the owner forestalled by declaring bankruptcy.

Since then, the two sides have engaged in lengthy negotiations leading to Tuesday’s agreement, which still requires approval of Bankruptcy Court.

The district “has stated from the very beginning that it intended to acquire the property,” Wilshire Center Marketplace said in a statement. “The partnership felt compelled to reach a settlement rather than continue in litigation.”

Now that the legal battles are over, the fate of one of the city’s most famous landmarks is once again at center stage.

Bernstein compares the building to the Texas Book Depository and the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, buildings that have been preserved as the sites of the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., respectively.

“In L.A., it has long been assumed the Ambassador Hotel would be demolished,” he said. “We believe the Ambassador has great national significance, but even more local significance for the role it played in the development of Los Angeles.”

Built when the Wilshire corridor was bean and barley fields, the structure represents one of the best works of architect Myron Hung, who designed the Rose Bowl and the Huntington Library, Bernstein said.

It hosted every president from Herbert Hoover through Richard Nixon. Its Cocoanut Grove nightclub was the premier gathering spot of celebrities and socialites during the 1930s and 1940s.

“We think once some of the options can be explained to the public--that it is possible to convert the Ambassador to educational use--this is something the community and the public can rally around,” Bernstein said.