Group Backs Romer’s Plan for Ambassador

On the eve of what many call a long overdue decision by the Los Angeles Unified School District, about 30 parents and community leaders gathered outside the Ambassador Hotel on Monday to support a compromise plan that combines limited preservation with construction of a new school on the site.

“These are the people that are going to be most affected,” said school board President Jose Huizar, who backed the plan proposed by Supt. Roy Romer a month ago. It would build a new school while dedicating about 5% of the project’s $318 million budget to preserving the hotel.

Huizar said many community members, including representatives from Latino and Korean groups, until recently had supported a plan to raze the famous hotel on Wilshire Boulevard.

“They’ve come to realize the district has been fiddling around for 15 years trying to figure out what type of school and what type of preservation is best,” Huizar said. “The time is now to move forward.”

On the last day of intense negotiations before the school board vote, many said the outcome was still far from certain.

Competing plans for the site vary widely in cost and extent of preservation of the historic hotel, whose Cocoanut Grove nightclub was once a gathering place for the elite. The hotel is best-known as the place where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1968 after winning the state Democratic presidential primary. Much of the controversy has centered on how to properly memorialize the former attorney general and U.S. senator from New York.

The hotel closed in 1989 after experiencing financial troubles, and has gone largely unused since, despite years of proposals and a consensus that the site should house a school.

Another plan from a coalition of community groups and former Kennedy aides would raze the hotel and build a new school in its place. That option is favored by the Kennedy family, which has said the hotel is not an appropriate memorial site. The Los Angeles Conservancy has urged the school district to preserve the hotel and incorporate a school into the restored site. Another proposal, announced days ago by school board member David Tokofsky, urges more preservation than the Huizar-Romer plan.

Lobbying on all sides continued Monday. But Peter Hong, a representative of the Korean American Federation, said its members “want to see something happen as quickly as possible.” About 3,800 students are bused from the neighborhood to less-crowded schools every day.

“Preservation is the least of our concerns right now,” he said.