Closing the deal

NEARLY 20 YEARS OF BATTLE, first over the ownership of the historic Ambassador Hotel and then over the fate of the structure itself, left the hotel a leaking wreck. Developer Donald Trump, itching to tear it down, did nothing to preserve the faded hotel as he fended off school board efforts to take over the property, a rare large tract in a very crowded mid-city area. By the time the school board got the hotel in 2001, preservation would have been so expensive and impractical that the board had little choice but to tear down the Ambassador to make way for a school complex.

A settlement this week, ending preservationists’ legal efforts to save more of the site, clears the way for badly needed schools that will, finally, serve students from kindergarten to 12th grade who currently have to be bused out of the area because local schools are overcrowded.

The Los Angeles Unified School District’s $4.9-million deal with the Los Angeles Conservancy and its allies followed a court decision dismissing preservationists’ claims in a suit against the district. Some have asked why the district agreed to a settlement in a case it had essentially won. But this argument ignores the realities of both the legal system and the construction process.

Supt. Roy Romer has noted that even a two-year additional delay on the $300-million Ambassador project could have driven costs up by $10 million, given the steep rise in construction costs. The pittance of a settlement goes into an independent trust, with proceeds to be spent on preservation projects throughout the district, saving old and sometimes forgotten murals, fixtures and artifacts in schools.

It’s still a shame to lose a building designed by architect Myron Hunt, who left his imprint on Southern California from the Rose Bowl to Occidental College. The hotel was more notorious as the site of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1968. At any rate, the building was never suited for conversion into a school, which conservancy forces demanded. More inventive alternatives were proposed too late in the process.

If there is a silver lining for preservationists, it is raised awareness (thanks to a Getty Foundation survey) that many of L.A.’s existing schools also have historic worth, sometimes buried in a stucco facade or out of sight behind an auto body shop. Here’s a suggestion, courtesy of the school board’s perennial questioner, David Tokofsky: Use some money from the settlement to freshen Jefferson High School in South Los Angeles, one of the district’s most troubled schools -- and one of its most beautiful.