The End of a 15-Year Detour

The Los Angeles school board ended 15 years of detours and disappointments Tuesday when it approved a controversial plan to raze most of the historic Ambassador Hotel and construct a school complex on the site. The decision is a victory for thousands of bused-away children in the densely packed mid-Wilshire neighborhood. The district may be losing a few students overall, but this area remains far behind on school seats. And it’s a win for Supt. Roy Romer, who shepherded the plan through weeks of intense lobbying by opponents -- preservationists intent on retaining the hotel as part of the campus plan, and civil rights groups angry that $15 million of the $318.2 million earmarked for the school’s construction will be spent to restore some portions of the hotel.

The plan, narrowly approved by a divided board, is an imperfect compromise that reflects the reality of clashing needs and dreams. The Ambassador, once the playground of the city’s rich and famous, is of historical and some architectural significance. Its legacy resonates nationally as the site of the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

But the hotel stood shuttered and crumbling for 15 years, as the space-starved district fought for it against developers who wanted to tear it down and put a high-rise in its place. The Los Angeles Conservancy could have been an ally in the fight, had it not come to the table empty-handed, expecting the district to foot the bill for expensive preservation.

A lot was on the line for the district Tuesday night, including the public perception that the district has finally turned around a school-building program hamstrung by politics and incompetence. The school board deserves credit for coolly making its way through a five-hour hearing that included tears, praise and veiled threats of political reprisal and litigation from dozens of speakers, including a conspiracy theorist urging that the hotel be saved for evidence of a second gunman in the Kennedy assassination.

Even if the would-be litigators can resist the urge, this imperfect but necessary compromise will take years to complete. Two years before groundbreaking. Six years until all three schools on the property are built. But after a very long wait, that’s an end easily in sight.