Faded Star Is Slow to Leave the Stage

Hollywood would call it The Long Goodbye. Some in the Wilshire district would simply call it long-winded.

Demolition of the landmark Ambassador Hotel to make way for a 4,200-seat campus is dragging on and on, they say, even though school officials have argued since the early 1990s that they desperately need its space for classrooms -- and need it quickly.

The tear-down is in its fifth month -- and to many Wilshire Boulevard passersby and neighbors, there appears to be no end in sight. In fact, there’s not even not a wrecking ball in sight.

Los Angeles Unified School District planners say the demolition only appears to be going slowly because workers were forced to remove asbestos and lead from the 85-year-old hotel before knocking down its concrete walls.

Now authorities have to deal with the unexpected discovery of methane gas beneath the 24-acre hotel grounds.

Soil tests last month revealed the problem. Experts said school builders will probably be required to install an “impermeable membrane” beneath the new campus, along with a network of pipes to vent the gas.

Authorities said Thursday that could add millions to the campus’ $270-million cost and could affect the planned 2008 opening of its elementary school. A middle school and a high school are also planned for the site; they are scheduled to open in 2009.

So maybe it’s a good thing that demolition workers didn’t give the Ambassador the kind of spectacular send-off some say the longtime celebrity hangout deserved: a dynamite-propelled implosion.

“It looks like they’re dismantling it piece by piece,” said Jason Robb, a wine seller who lives across Wilshire Boulevard from the hotel in the venerable Gaylord Apartments, itself a throwback to the boulevard’s golden past.

“It would have been more exciting to see it come down in one big swoop. It looks like a war zone, the way they’re doing it.”

Doug Russell, who works in an office nearby, had also wondered why dynamite wasn’t used to bring down the 500-room concrete structure, which for generations dominated the 3400 block of Wilshire Boulevard.

“They’re keeping the front part, so they couldn’t just go in with a wrecking ball,” Russell said. “They have an old ballroom they want to preserve. So they have to kind of dismantle it one piece at a time. Now it makes sense.”

The ballroom he spoke of is the Cocoanut Grove, the famous nightclub that for decades was a favorite hangout for movie stars.

Designed by Paul Williams, the club used fake palms salvaged from Rudolph Valentino’s 1921 movie “The Sheik” to accent the stage where the likes of Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand and Sammy Davis Jr. regularly performed.

Its next performers will be of the teenage variety. Planners intend to convert the nightclub into an auditorium for the high school. Behind that will be the middle school and the elementary school.

Many construction details are still being worked out even as the six-story hotel is whittled down.

There had been talk of preserving the historic pantry -- where Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1968 -- by installing it in the new high school’s future library. But planners now say they’re not sure what they’re going to do with that grim piece of Americana.

And what about replicating the hotel’s distinctive Wilshire-facing facade, as was discussed when the school district was fighting the Los Angeles Conservancy over the demolition? That also remains undecided.

Crews from Covina-based Cleveland Wrecking Co. began tearing down the Ambassador in mid-September. They should be finished in mid-March, said Jeff Droubay, Cleveland’s vice president and project manager.

As spectacular a finale as dynamite might have been, Droubay said the Ambassador could not be blown up.

The adjoining neighborhood had to be protected from flying asbestos and lead from paint applied to the hotel over the years, Droubay said. “There was a lot of abatement that had to be done first, removal of hazardous material.”

As for the methane gas, Angelo Bellomo, the school district’s environmental health and safety director, said Thursday that the Ambassador does not sit atop an oil field but is midway between two.

“It’s not a Belmont situation,” said district spokeswoman Shannon Johnson-Haber, referring to the methane gas that in 2000 halted construction of the Belmont Learning Center near downtown. Officials estimate that fixing Belmont’s problems have doubled the original $175-million cost of what will be called Vista Hermosa High School when it opens in 2009.

Jim Cowell, the school district’s director of construction, said documentation of the Ambassador’s past for the historical record also added to “the perception that it’s taking a long time” to raze the hotel.

There was plenty to include in the record. Every U.S. president from Herbert Hoover to Richard Nixon stayed at the Ambassador at one time or another. After delivering a victory speech in the hotel’s Embassy Ballroom in June of 1968, Kennedy was gunned down while exiting through the adjacent pantry.

“We have removed and preserved the portion of the building referred to as the pantry,” Cowell said. “That’s being stored off-site. What will be done with it is uncertain. There are a number of options, and a committee of experts has been commissioned by the superintendent to look at them.”

Designers have yet to decide on the architectural look of the high school that will replace it. But it will not replicate the hotel’s famous facade.

Cowell hesitates to even use the word “replicate.”

“We’re going to maintain the iconic view from Wilshire, the large expanse of open space,” he said. “We’re going to build the school in exactly that location with the same sort of shape to the front: a set-back wing shape.”

The high school’s athletic field will cover the grassy area between the Cocoanut Grove and Wilshire Boulevard. Once rubble is cleared, the acreage will be graded, probably this summer.

That area is now being used for soccer, although players are being kept well away from the hotel. So is everyone else. Guards record the license plates and driver’s license numbers of everyone going to the site.

One district administrator joked that the tight security was to keep intruders from making off with chunks of the Ambassador to sell on EBay. One brick was already being offered on the Internet auction site. The highest bid at midweek was $2. Shipping was an additional $5.75.

Many of those watching the Ambassador’s demolition praise the deliberation and dignity that are accompanying it.

Joni Coyote, a film location scout from Pasadena who booked the hotel for several commercials, appreciated that the original clay tiles that were personally specified by hotel architect Myron Hunt were carefully salvaged from the Ambassador’s roof before demolition began (Cleveland Wrecking Co. got them).

“It was a good filming location,” said Coyote, referring to the more than 100 productions shot there after the hotel closed to overnight guests in 1989. The roster includes “Pretty Woman,” “Forrest Gump” and “The Mask.”

Soon, it will be Farewell, My Lovely.