Los Angeles Unified, known for racking up some of the largest bills for school construction projects in history, has a new project at the top of its chart.
The project to build schools on the site of the former Ambassador Hotela historic icon where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinatedis now estimated to cost more than $578 million, according to the Los Angeles Times. The K-12 campus was more recently redesigned after construction began to include a handful of small schools.
Part of the gigantic price tag went for preservation of a handful of the most prized features of the once-luminous hotel, but other factors were the cost of the site’s premier location on Wilshire Boulevard. and years of legal wrangling with developers (including Donald Trump, who wanted the land to build the world’s tallest building).
LAUSD has certainly had its share of projects with ballooning price tagsmost notably the Belmont Learning Center site, where an earthquake fault line and environmental concerns delayed construction for years in the late 1990s.
The Ambassador project, though, came with much more emotion and controversy. LAUSD has struggled to build schools in its downtown areas to alleviate severe overcrowding, and this community had long been waiting for a new campus while children were being bused to other schools. At the same time, historic preservationists were hoping to save at least some parts of the original buildings and create a campus that would pay homage to the legacy of the Ambassador.
The site includes a rebuilt model of the Cocoanut Grove nightclub, the ballroom where Kennedy gave his acceptance speech just before the assassination was rebuilt as a library, and a coffee shop is now a teachers’ lounge.
Now that the project is nearly finished and scheduled to open this month, what’s confounded many architects and observers is that the new five-story main building is designed to mirror the shape of the old hotelin a decidedly contemporary manner.
L. A. Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne recently wrote, “What other city would knock down a major cultural landmark a hotel where half a dozen early Academy Award ceremonies were held, to say nothing of the site’s architectural and political significance but then insist that the school replacing it squeeze into the same shape, so that anybody who remembers what used to be there is confronted not with tangible history but a ghostly shell of the original?”
While visiting LAUSD in 2004, I drove up to the Ambassador site for a peek. By then, the hotel had been closed and fenced off for more than 10 years, the yards were overgrown, and the stucco buildings were crumbling. It was hard to envision it returning as a schooland I think I’ve got a pretty good eye for potential. (If you’re curious, this photographer has some excellent photographs taken a few months before the demolition on his website).
Nevertheless, there were some viable proposals to save the original buildings, and it would have been fascinating to see it restored. In Washington, D.C., several historic school buildings have been recently renovated and reopenedI wrote about Phelps High School as part of our special guide to green schools in ASBJ’s April 2009 issue, and architect Sean O’Donnell writes about the just-completed School Without Walls project for the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
For what it’s worth, though, the school board and the district’s facility office were dealing with many competing demands, and the community desperately needed new schools. School board President Monica Garcia told the L.A. Times that the new site “is absolutely without a doubt a critical investment that could not have been done any other way because of all the challenges.”
Joetta Sack-Min, Associate Editor
