A Clash of 2 Passionate Forces

For more than a quarter-century, they’ve been the ones in the white hats, the cavalry riding to the rescue of beloved landmarks threatened by bulldozers.

Then two weeks ago, the conservancy collided with Camelot.

And suddenly, the Los Angeles Conservancy found itself in an emotional battle with one of America’s most prominent political families.

The widow and children of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy denounced the group’s efforts to preserve the Ambassador Hotel and the pantry where he was assassinated in 1968.

Kennedy family members asked that all remnants of the Ambassador be removed and replaced with new school buildings. The hotel, they said, is a “reminder of anger, fear and hate.” It would be wrong “to preserve a site of misery.”

Conservancy leaders responded by stepping up their campaign to persuade the Los Angeles Unified School District -- which owns the 24-acre site -- to keep the Ambassador intact and convert its guestrooms into classrooms.

In a compromise that the conservancy has rejected, school administrators proposed keeping the Ambassador’s look by erecting a hotel-like facade in front of a new classroom building and incorporating the Cocoanut Grove nightclub, the pantry assassination site and the Embassy Ballroom into the new school. School board members are to vote Tuesday on the site’s future.

Preservationists say they have spent nearly two decades studying ways to save the 83-year-old hotel. They consider it one of Los Angeles’ signature landmarks, a place where celebrities mixed with the common person and where local and global histories are intertwined.

The Kennedy family went public with its opposition Sept. 23. An essay written by Robert’s son Maxwell and published in The Times urged that the millions of dollars that preservation would cost be directly spent on classrooms instead.

A week later, widow Ethel Kennedy and seven of her children warned school officials that “if these offensive elements remain part of the school design, our family would seriously question as to whether to support naming the school for Robert Kennedy,” as many locals have suggested.

The family’s stance jolted some conservancy supporters, many of whom say they admire both the work of the Kennedy family and the efforts of the preservation group.

“I don’t think the conservancy realized the family didn’t want that as a memorial. I don’t think the conservancy realized the depth of the family’s feelings,” said Councilman Tom LaBonge, a preservation advocate and expert on city history.

Journalist and local historian Kevin Roderick, who has written a book about Wilshire Boulevard, said of the group: “Maybe they should have seen it coming. But I would disagree it’s a black eye for the conservancy.”

But conservancy member and Kennedy family friend Paul Schrade thinks the group has come away with a pair of shiners.

“The conservancy has been dishonest with me as a member, and maybe with its board,” complained Schrade, a union and community organizer who has a unique perspective on the dispute: He was standing in the hotel pantry next to Robert Kennedy at the time of the assassination and was wounded in the head by one of the bullets.

“Preserving that hotel is not an appropriate memorial to Robert Kennedy. It is ghoulish,” said Schrade, who has long advocated replacing the Ambassador with a school in Kennedy’s honor.

Conservancy members remain passionate in believing they are on the right side of the dispute. But they expressed frustration that the Kennedys waited so long to speak up. “We always thought they had very personal reasons whether this building should be preserved,” said Linda Dishman, the conservancy’s executive director.

“We had been told by somebody in the family that everything related to the assassination should be sent to Ted Kennedy. We did, but we never heard back. That was about two or so years ago.”

(Schrade disputes this, saying that Sen. Edward Kennedy asked him to relay the family’s position on the hotel’s preservation to the conservancy a year ago and that he complied.)

Actress Diane Keaton, a conservancy director, said the Ambassador could be retrofitted as a learning center where language students could read “The Great Gatsby” in the very place its author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, stayed. Youngsters studying theater and music could perform at the Cocoanut Grove, where myriad performers of the 20th century worked.

History lessons would be taught in a place where every president from Herbert Hoover to Richard Nixon once stayed, Keaton said Friday, noting that Nixon wrote his famous “Checkers” speech at the hotel in 1952.

Perhaps most important, youngsters would experience history by walking where Robert Kennedy took his final steps.

“The Ambassador, as a vital educational campus, can be a living testament to the RFK legacy,” the conservancy asserts in a position paper.

Conservancy leaders point out that they have weathered criticism and controversy many times since the group was organized in 1978 to save the downtown Central Library. Since then, successful preservation campaigns have been waged for such structures as the 1931 Art Deco Wiltern Theatre, the 1939 Streamline Moderne Wilshire Boulevard May Co. building, the 1876 St. Vibiana’s Cathedral and Downey’s circa-1953 “world’s oldest McDonald’s” restaurant.

In their Ambassador campaign, conservancy officials erected a 48-foot billboard Tuesday on the hotel’s Wilshire Boulevard grounds urging school leaders: “Teach History. Don’t Erase It.”

But the message was removed Friday, angering preservationists who paid $5,000 to rent the billboard from an outdoor advertising company that leases the sign space from the school district. Glenn Gritzner, a special assistant to L.A. Unified Supt. Roy Romer, said school officials did not request the removal.

Nonetheless, Dishman was outraged. “This is censorship. They’re censoring history and they’re censoring debate,” she said.

She said she remained puzzled by the Kennedy family’s position.

“Why they decided to weigh in on this instead of the six-floor Book Depository Building I don’t know,” Dishman said of the Dallas structure where President Kennedy’s assassin hid in 1963.

“Should one family be able to say what should happen to the site? If they have a very painful memory, often they don’t want the building preserved. But the victim doesn’t get to set the punishment in horrible crimes.”