Cocoanut Grove to be razed to build school campus
LOS
ANGELES (AP) – The School District has signed an agreement with a preservation
group to allow the razing of the historic Cocoanut Grove nightclub to make way
for a new campus.
The
Los Angeles Unified School District will pay $4 million to fund historic school
conservation so the Los Angeles Conservancy will drop a lawsuit that had been
holding up the destruction of the Cocoanut Grove. It’s the last building
standing on the former site of the Ambassador Hotel, where U.S. Sen. Robert F.
Kennedy was assassinated in 1968.
“At
this point, we as an organization want to move on,” Linda Dishman,
the conservancy’s executive director, said Jan. 15. “What’s left at the
Ambassador site is not really historic preservation at this point, and there’s
a lot of other buildings we can focus on.”
The
school district plans to build three schools on the site to house 4,000
students.
On
Nov. 29, however, a Superior Court judge approved an injunction preventing the
demolition of the nightclub until the lawsuit was resolved.
The
district originally planned to preserve the Cocoanut Grove as part of the
school site but determined that it can’t withstand an earthquake and would be
unsafe.
“There’s
no way we can say to parents, ‘Don’t worry, we think it’s OK,’ if our
structural engineers say that we can’t,” Kevin Reed, the district’s general
counsel, said in November.
The
Cocoanut Grove once was the city’s leading nightclub, featuring Frank Sinatra
and Bing Crosby.