Glitz, Glamour Find Unlikely New Home in the Wilshire District

Los Angeles' New Ambassadors   

Six Schools on a Campus Like  no  Other

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The Architecturally Acclaimed Auditorium at

Ambassador/RFK Campus' Los Angeles High School for the Arts (LAHSA): 

Witness:  A reinterpretation of the aesthetic of  the iconic nightlife venue that helped define what was probably Hollywood's most glamorous period--from the 1920s to the early 1950s, when Harlow, Hughes and Hepburn graced the Ambassador Hotel's own Cocoanut Grove night club.  

One neighbor of RFK Community Schools said the auditorium by itself is the best thing that's happened to youth in this inner-city part of Southern California in decades, and that it shows.  The woman, who lives within visual distance of the RFK campus, says she raised two of her own now grown and "very successful" children in L.A.'s pulbic school system.  She also said, after years of apathy and neglect regarding public schools in Los Angeles, she can now sees students who seem proud of where they go to school.  When walking her dog some mornings, the longtime Wilshire District resident has recently noted a new excitement in the eyes of the students she sees walking to toward the six RFK schools located at the former Ambassador Hotel site.    (Watch for video of RoLA's interview with the neighbor and others with school officials and students--all in coming installmentsot of our special series on the Ambassador/RFK site.  Meantime, here are some interior shots of the schools' auditorium inspired by, and built at the former site of the old Cocoanut Grove.)

Though not all who lamented, and still mourn, the demolition of the Ambassador in 2005 are completely satisfied with the outcome of their failed battle to completely  preserve the property, some concede that the new schools' auditorium (which actually retains much Cocoanut Grove building's construction in its last incarnation before the closure of the Ambassador for good in 1989); succeeds in some measure invoking the spirit of the original Grove.

The faculty-staff-and their-guests-only lounge at RFK Community Schools is a faithfully restored original 1950s diner designed by Paul R. Williams, a pioneering African-American architect whose work (Beverly Wilshire Hotel [major redesign]; Saks Fifth Avenue, Beverly Hills; Chasens Restaurant; Theme building at LAX (the sweeping, swoopy structure at the center of the airport's terminals area);  helped define the classical Los Angeles architecture asthetic. 



   

Ambassador Hotel's Gone, Poignancy of New School's Design Honors Kennedy

Los Angeles' New Ambassadors   

Six Schools on a Campus Like  no  Other

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Reporter Surprised by Own Emotional Response to RFK Tributes at Ambassador (video)

[PART II in a multi-post, multimedia special RoLA Series.]  

We appreciate your patience in viewing video on RoLA in small snippets, which, at the moment, are the most efficient way for us to upload and for you to enjoy, in light of the currently very modest resources available to the blog.  


That said, RoLA expects to augment our capacities before the end of 2011.  If all goes as planned, you'll be visiting a much improved site in terms of content and format.  And, as a current consumer of information on Republic Of L.A., you can expect to receive special access to enhanced content on the new RoLA, as well as to some pretty cool events planned for election year, 2012.  


In the meantime, here are the first two videos in this special series about RFK Community Schools.  We've begun the series at the Robert F. Kennedy Inspiration Park and its memorial to the late brother also-assasinated John F. Kennedy.  BTW, It's okay to snicker at how strangely and unexpectedly emotional my visit there was:  

In the next video installment of this special Republic of L.A. series about RFK Learning Center at the Ambassador Campus, hear what muralized quotes were borrowed from Rosa Parks and George Bernard Shaw for the Ambassador site.  

Rob't. Kennedy's Knowing Smile Shines at the Gateway to L.A.'s Best Investment in Decades: RFK Community Schools at the Ambassador Site

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Los Angeles' New Ambassadors   
Six Schools on a Campus Like  no  Other   

R

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Thom Senzee, dwarfed by the shadow of RFK.

Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy, slain brother of also-assasinated Pres. John F. Kennedy, understood that government is supposed to be the common ground where human beings meet solve problems, share costs for the big things civilizations need in order to survive and thrive, and to band together against enemies as they come and go.

❝ each time a man stands for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. 

❞

We hear so many throw-away assertions, nowadays, about how our government is the least of what makes the United States of America great and what makes this country's people so unique.  It's a very popular and, dare I say, fashionable point of view.  And so is has been for the past 30 or more years.  That's all of my adult life.  

The problem with the assumption that Americans have been and remain more free, more prosperous and more inventive than any other society in human history in spite of how we govern ourselves, is that it is absolutely wrong.  In fact, that perspective represents the epitome of missing the forest for the trees.  It is in fact our government's ability to be simultaneously run by those who decry its general "badness," 

Ask anyone from a country mired in endless civil wars, wretched poverty and hunger, sytemic corrutpion, violent oppression of women and minorities, institutional exploitation of certain classes if they believe the U.S. government with its strengths and weaknesses; its cost and size; or its very public vulnerabilities and shortcomings have anything to do with what makes ours the land toward which longing eyes point from lands with governments that are often (to borrow one of the revered business buzz phrases of all time) "lean and mean."

Business.  Business' goal is to profit.  Does anyone want a government looking to make a profit?  I didn't think so.  So, given that making money is not the reason we want our governments--federal, state and local--to exist; why do so many politicians keep acting like government should be run like a business?  The gossimer-thin considerations that lead some to the misconception that the U.S. Congress should act as savvy board members of a Fortune 500 company and that the president of the United States should behave like the CEO of the same firm must have to start lickety-split ticking of exceptions to that philosophical model of government.  

Take something as seemingly mundane as buildings for an example of what I mean:  Run the government like a Fortune 500 company, and you'd expect training campuses, i.e., public schools, to gleam be gleaming, luxurious towers, like the shimmering edifices that house their corporate counterparts.  Well?  If you want to run a successful business, you've got to look the part, right?  Can't have clients get the idea we're second rate.  Who are the government's clients by the way?  Taxpayers?  Well, no. We're the investors, I believe.  We don't want our own company selling us stuff; so, we're certainly not the customers...I digress.

Schools--public schools, that is, have mostly fallen into disrepair or at least just ugliness and bare-minimum upkeep during most of the past 25 years or so.  Meanwhile, banks, public corporations, media megalopolies and private companies have continued to be the beneficiaries of generous investment in their own infrastructures in the form of state-of-the-art technology and impressive headquarters across the nation.  

But, here in Los Angeles, there's a new story to be told about investment in public education, and perhaps surprisingly to some, the excitement among students that seems unmistakable to just about anyone who encounters students at any of the six schools of the Ambassador campus on Wilshire Blvd. , which sits on the site of, and uses some of the original construction of, the old Ambassador Hotel, where 1968 presidential candidate was shot dead.  The place is a temple to optimism and youth--just as Bobbie would have wanted it.  

Stay tuned as RoLA takes you to a the seat of public K-12 education's special new paradigm now open in the heart of the City of Angels.  

-Thom Senzee