Lawsuits Filed to Prevent Razing of Ambassador

The Los Angeles Conservancy and a coalition of other local organizations announced Tuesday that they have filed two lawsuits seeking to stop the Los Angeles Unified School District from razing a significant portion of the historic Ambassador Hotel.

The school district wants to build a $318-million campus for 4,200 students on the hotel property. In October, the Los Angeles Board of Education narrowly voted to back a plan, supported by Supt. Roy Romer and Board President Jose Huizar, that calls for saving the Cocoanut Grove nightclub, a coffee shop designed by noted architect Paul Williams and parts of the ceiling of the Embassy Ballroom -- but little else. That preservation would cost the district about $15 million.

The district billed that plan as a compromise aimed at appeasing preservationists and those calling for the district to knock the hotel down altogether in favor of expediently building schools on the site.

But at a news conference Tuesday, a parade of speakers, including the president of the Latino Urban Forum, the head of the Mexican American Political Assn. and actress Diane Keaton, said the district had not done enough to consider how to preserve more of the hotel.

“We really must fight for a compromise,” said Keaton, who has long called for the hotel’s preservation. “It would send the right message to all children in LAUSD.”

Both lawsuits -- one filed by the conservancy and another by a group of seven organizations, including the Art Deco Society of Los Angeles, the California Preservation Foundation and the Korean Culture Center -- contend that the district’s Final Environmental Impact Report, which the school board approved last month, failed to comply with requirements of the state environmental quality law.

The conservancy suit also seeks a preliminary injunction to restrain the district from taking any action to alter or demolish the hotel and its outbuildings.

Conservancy officials want the district to build a school elsewhere on the site and leave the main hotel building intact.

Romer said the district is prepared to fight the two lawsuits and expects to win. But he said he was upset that the groups have forced the district to spend its money defending itself.

He called the conservancy’s alternate plan “chaotic.”

“It just doesn’t work for kids,” he said.

Huizar also said he was disappointed by the legal action. “We should make the board decision stand,” he said.

Victor Viramontes, a staff attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which has long opposed using any public funds to preserve the hotel, called the lawsuits “shameful and outrageous.”

The groups, he said, are “choosing to trample on the education of the children” by requiring the district to spend precious education dollars on litigation.

MALDEF is considering its own legal options, he said, “so that parents and community members aren’t left out of the process.”