After 68

I am still sad The Ambassador Hotel in LA was demolished. There’s a Kickstarter underway to fund a documentary about the hotel’s storied history in real life—it’s where Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed—and in film, where it was the number one filming location in LA for many years.

The Devil is in the Details, Ponta Delgada, Azores 

That there should be two tall towers in the town, that large buildings should have arcades that are of a certain height and width, that there should be fountains in certain places, that streets should intersect in certain places, that some buildings of a certain height should be built near other buildings of a certain height, that some sidewalks should have ornamentation, that some spaces should have vegetation, that some streets need to be narrower than others, and some streets need to curve ever so slightly, that some places should be left open… 

I could go on and on. I don’t know what it is about colonial cities, especially Spanish and Portuguese ones. Their urban form and imageability just makes so much sense, and while they were clearly planned, so much about them feels unplanned and genuine. 

New Urbanism often fails to create this feeling, and honestly I don’t know what can really, because i’m quite sure that if you re-created this exact town but made it all new construction, it would feel tacky. 

I suppose genuine authentic places are not nearly as much about the design as about the history of the place.

Which makes me wonder…and I’m going to need help with this:

by Dana Goodyear

 (4174  words)

(Originally published in The New Yorker. Compilation copyright (c) 2005 The Conde Nast Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

The western entrance to the Ambassador Hotel, an H-shaped nineteen-twenties Spanish Revival that occupies a twenty-three-acre parcel on Wilshire Boulevard, is a monumental porte-cochere. Thick columns, banded with green, yellow, and shell-pink tiles, support a crown of flagless flagpoles and a simple rectangular Art Deco clock that is stopped at ten-thirty. Surrounded by dying palms and a few neglected birds-of-paradise, the hotel, at eighty-four, has the look of a governor’s house in an abandoned tropical colony. In some places, the yellow plaster is so worn that you can see the outlines of the clay tiles beneath, like capillaries under fragile skin; in other places the plaster has flaked off altogether. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald used to stay here (they are said to have set fire to their bungalow, and their bill), but now the only residents are fifty feral cats, including Buster, Pinky, and Scabby (a mangy gray with half a tongue), who survive on scraps of catered food left over from movie crews. “The Graduate" was filmed at the hotel; more recently, the six hundred guest rooms, creepy basements, and derelict tunnels have been used as sets for horror movies and “Six Feet Under" episodes. This arrangement, which generates a million dollars a year in location fees, is likely to end soon. The Los Angeles Unified School District owns the building, and has announced that it plans to raze most of it and in its place erect a school for the thirty-eight hundred children, mainly Hispanic and Korean, who are bused out of the neighborhood every day.