Ghost bridge: The Cocoanut Grove awaits its new tenants
In the end, it wasn't about the building.
The grand Ambassador Hotel, its inexorable destruction by the LAUSD and tonight's wake at the Gaylord Apartments across the street from the gutted monolith of the Cocoanut Grove were about the people: kings and presidents, movie stars and chambermaids - all the lives that transected its baroque lobby and inhabited it from the suites to the cheap rooms.
A good 250 people piled into the ornate lobby of the Gaylord Apartments, drank a good deal of liquor (provided by the L.A. Conservancy) and listened to lament after eloquent lament over the Ambassador's demise ...
They were conservancy folks, Ambassador staff, members of the Shine(sp?-ed.) family (the last family owners of the hotel) and a blogger or two.
Conservancy president Roland Wiley raised a toast to Bobby Kennedy and other hotel guests - "People who had the courage to die for what they believed in."
FranklinAvenue's Mike Schneider, who's been blogging the hell out of the Ambassador's last days and co-organized the wake (seen here at right with Mary Melton of L.A. Magazine and Kevin Roderick) urged everyone to remember other great losses to L.A. architecture - and work to save more in the future: "I hope as many of you as possible will join us to take pictures of these buildings and chronicle these buildings, because unless we do this, they're gonna be gone forever."
Actress/photographer/conservancy activist Diane Keaton shamed L.A.'s news reporters for failing to write compellingly enough about the Ambassador's 20-year decay to prevent the hotel's demolition and recalled (with characteristic Annie Hall wiftiness) seeing the sunset cast the shadow of the skeleton on 7th Street buildings as the bulldozers and cranes did their worst.
But the loveliest tribute came from Carlyn Frank Benjamin - daughter of one of the Ambassador's first caretakers, and a 16-year resident of the hotel from the time it opened in 1921: "I'd always hoped the old girl would put on some new clothes and some comfortable shoes and some rose-scented moisturizing lotion, and that she could have had a new lease on life. ..."
And then she conjured the image of the Ambassador's ghosts rising up, filtering up through the debris and inspiring the LAUSD students who will occupy the school soon to be built on the site.
If that can happen, the death of the Ambassador won't have been a huge waste.
Posted by: Mack_Reed on Thursday, February 02, 2006 - 11:17 PM
