After the rousing overture we await the Fitzgerald symphony with baited breath. Perhaps this nugget from LA-LA Land will entertain and distract the viewers.
Soon, the wrecking ball will come for Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel. This landmark, located on Wilshire Boulevard in what is now locally known as "Koreatown", has been the subject of intense controversy and litigation since its closure in 1989. The hotel has been an integral part of the city's heritage, hosting several Academy Award ceremonies, appearing in numerous films including "The Graduate" and serving many US presidents and cultural figures ranging from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Albert Einstein. The Ambassador's unique interiors including the world famous "Coconut Grove" nightclub, inlaid ballroom ceiling and art deco fixtures will be radically altered or destroyed entirely. Unfortunately, the most prominent aspect of the Ambassador's legacy is its identity as the location of the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968
Currently, the hotel sits by itself, cordoned off by a chain link fence in what is predominately a bustling part of the city. Preservationists, civic groups and even politicians have pleaded with the property's current owner to incorporate the main building of the hotel into its new identity, thereby preserving the RFK site. All attempts at compromise have been ignored. Throughout this lengthy process, the developer has neglected even basic maintenance, transforming the building's once splendid exterior into a decrepit and deteriorating hulk. Perhaps the most galling aspect surrounding the fate of this landmark is the entity responsible for its removal, not the typical billionaire mercenary without a stake in the community but none other than the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Ford's Theatre, the Texas School Book Depository and yes, even the Lorraine Motel are all locations that have been preserved as memorials to the relevant individuals involved. While Bobby Kennedy's political profile has diminished over the years, there is no doubt that his assassination was a pivotal event in American history. That a school district would fail to see the value in preserving such a site and so adamantly insist on its destruction raises fundamentally troubling questions. It is not as if the district is not fully aware of the significance of the property. For the entire fourteen year period of the hotel's disposition, the public was strictly forbidden to enter the hotel and view the assassination site. Film production crews and an occasional LA Times columnist shilling for the district's design plans were the only individuals allowed access to what is essentially a publicly owned piece of land.
While this lack of perspective might surprise non-residents, it is a mentality that Los Angelenos have come to expect from the bureaucracy running the LAUSD. The second largest school district in the country, responsible for over 800,000 students within a 708 square mile area (about two thirds the size of Rhode Island), the district is perceived as setting new standards of incompetence for the public sector. Headed by former Colorado governor Roy Romer, its test scores, graduation and dropout rates, especially among minorities, are alarming even by inner city standards and have attracted state scrutiny and numerous lawsuits.
Witness the amazing saga of the Belmont School, a structure undertaken in the mid- nineties, less than a mile from the Ambassador. This new edifice was billed as a state of the art high school, desperately needed for the local children who were currently being bussed all over the district. But during the construction process, things went terribly wrong. With an opening date on the horizon, the LAUSD suddenly announced that the school was sitting on an environmentally toxic site that would expose students to methane and hydrogen sulfide. While the district frantically tried to remedy that situation, subsequent environmental studies indicated that the school was also situated on a major earthquake fault, a development that shut down construction. Eight years after building began and hundreds of millions of dollars later, the school sits unopened, surrounded by the now familiar chain link fence. The district has recently solicited bids to complete the project, a process that will consume additional funds and involve tearing down buildings that have never been used. The current estimated date of opening is 2007 with a cost of over three hundred million dollars for one as yet unused high school.
The Ambassador story is also a cautionary tale for those who believe that pouring untold billions into public education is a solution for the consistently poor performance rendered by many public school systems. In fact, one major reason for the longevity of litigation involving the Ambassador was the district's inability to figure out how to pay for the twenty-four acre parcel. The solution came in the form of several bond issues whose ostensible purpose was to fund the "construction and repair" necessary to accommodate soaring enrollment. Suddenly flush with money, the district paid private developers 109 million dollars in 2001, close to three times the original 1991 Ambassador purchase price. When you include the controversy surrounding the district's purchase of its own downtown headquarters, another boondoggle involving tens of millions, quick arithmetic shows an expenditure of a half billion dollars on three buildings that to date have not helped to educate a single student. Conversely, in his recent negotiations for a new contract for teachers, Superintendent Romer maintained that there was no room for ANY salary increase, ultimately agreeing to a meager 2% raise. Considering the district's approach to real estate, it is no wonder that the voters of Los Angeles are being asked to approve another 3.9 billion dollar bond issue this November, a fourth measure to increase district property taxes and bring the eight year bond issue grand total to 14.9 billion dollars.
There can be no doubt that the district is faced with a crisis concerning student enrollment. Many neighborhood parents were angered by the delay over the Ambassador's demolition, believing that the hotel was not as important as the immediate needs of their children. But many experts have weighed in on the district's plan to install a mega-campus that will provide instruction for over three thousand students in one location. This type of institutional monolith has been decried as a major cause of student alienation and an outmoded form of design. The campus layout is so large that it will include a separate outpost for the LAUSD police officers who will patrol the property, a likely necessity in light of the widespread racial violence that has recently broken out throughout Los Angeles high schools.
Despite all of these architectural, historic and educational concerns, the LAUSD has never hesitated. This August, when a judge affirmed that the district had fulfilled all of its required environmental impact obligations and could proceed with demolition, the Los Angeles Conservancy, the major group leading the opposition to the project, threw in the towel. Apparently, the additional daily rush hour ingress and egress of more than three thousand individuals into an area already choked with traffic and every possible form of urban congestion was deemed environmentally inconsequential. Realistically, the hotel was already being decimated by the uprooting of palm trees, destruction of bungalows and expansive swimming pool and the stripping of fixtures from the hotel's main building. The LAUSD did agree to several concessions regarding some of the hotel's artifacts. The famous ballroom ceiling will be incorporated into the school's new auditorium and the vintage art deco coffee shop will reemerge as one of several faculty lounges. With regard to the kitchen pantry location where Robert F. Kennedy was shot by Sirhan Sirhan, the district will only say that it plans to extricate it en masse and place it in storage for some as yet unannounced purpose. One wonders if the students who pass through the new school's doors will be aware of Senator Kennedy's dedication to providing them with dignity, equal opportunity and social justice. In fact, considering the performance and priorities of current LAUSD administrators, one wonders if future students will even be aware that Bobby Kennedy ever lived at all.