A sad moment for Los Angeles

Tuesday's Los Angeles Times reported that the LA Conservancy has officially given up its fight to save the historic Ambassador Hotel from demolition by the LA Unified School District. While not surprising, this is nonetheless a sad event that we will long regret. More than a blow to historic preservation, this is a significant loss for the very school children that are supposedly being served by the School Board's decision to raze the hotel to make room for desperately needed, but extremely poorly and unimaginatively planned, new schools in central Los Angeles. For those unfamiliar with the situation, the Ambassador Hotel is a 1920s landmark located in the heart of the Wilshire Center district west of downtown LA, near Macarthur Park and Koreatown (3400 Wilshire Blvd., 90010). After closing its doors for good in 1989, and being briefly controlled by "the Donald" as the would-be site of a new Trump Tower, this highly historic building and property was acquired by LAUSD at a bargain price. While nobody disputes the need for new schools in the neighborhood, nor even the idea of using the sprawling Ambassador site for such schools, LAUSD's plans have been controversial because they would destroy most of the Hotel's main building--something that doesn't sit very well with preservationists, who are most vociferously represented by the LA Conservancy. And despite a number of creative, promising-looking compromise proposals designed to serve both the interests of historic preservation and public education, the majority of the School Board has defiantly, stubbornly, and blindly stuck to its original plan. The real tragedy here is that the public debate, despite the Conservancy's tremendous efforts, has simplistically pitted the two interests (preservation and education) against each other, when the reality is that they so closely overlap. In other words, an opportunity was missed here for an exciting win-win project that could have further established Los Angeles as a leading force in adaptive reuse and progressive, public-spirited architectural preservation. For more on the Ambassador Hotel and LAUSD's plans, check out the following:

• The LA Conservancy's viewpoint: November 2004 and August 2005
• Another save-the-hotel website
• The villain in this story - LAUSD
• thoughts from the local Wilshire Center neighborhood business association

Finally, to further reveal why I am so saddened by the Ambassador's iminent demise, here is the text of an advocacy letter I sent last year to the LAUSD school board: "Please, Please, Please save the Ambassador Hotel! "I am the parent of a young child who attends an LAUSD school, as well as an educator at a local community college. I teach, among other subjects, an introductory class in urban studies, and one of the central themes of that class is the fascinating, multi-layered history of Los Angeles and greater Southern California. Sadly, another theme of the class is how that history remains popularly unknown, all too often erased from the landscape, to the degree that our local communities and larger metropolitan society struggle to orient themselves in time and space. As eloquently argued by internationally known scholars such as Dolores Hayden and Kevin Lynch--among countless others--there is a very real "power of place" (to use Hayden's phase) that can be preserved and cultivated in the landscape for the greater social good. We obviously live in a large, diverse society, and one of the best ways for all of us as individuals and groups to develop a true, humane sense of local community (and communities) is through a broadly preserved but also actively used urban landscape. "A creatively and sensitively designed adaptive reuse of the Ambassador Hotel as a center of public education would be an outstanding addition to several other noteworthy preservation and adaptive-reuse efforts throughout the city and region. The LA Conservancy has demonstrated the financial feasibility of such a project. To close the door on their vision for the property's future would represent a closing of a much more important door--the opportunity to instill in our children, through the public schools, an historically informed sense of place, and indeed, a real pride of place. We live in a truly great city, and it's a shame that too many people derive their pride in this place from a far-too-short list of icons: the Lakers, the beaches, and, perhaps, Disney Concert Hall. This city has far more to offer; please don't sell our children short."