Ambassador Hotel, historic hotel in San Francisco's Tenderloin district
The Ambassador Hotel was a large hotel on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, designed by architect Myron Hunt and opened in 1921. It occupied a sizeable plot in what is now the Koreatown neighborhood and contained a grand lobby, a famous nightclub, and several dining rooms.
The hotel opened in 1921 along a stretch of Wilshire Boulevard that was still unpaved at the time, and it helped shape the street into one of Los Angeles's main addresses. In 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was shot on the premises after a campaign speech, an event that cast a long shadow over the building until it closed in 1989.
The Cocoanut Grove nightclub inside the hotel drew performers and celebrities from the film industry for decades, making it a fixture of Los Angeles social life. Its painted palm trees and Moroccan-inspired decor gave the space a look unlike anything else in the city at the time.
The hotel was demolished in 2005 and 2006 and no longer exists as a building. The Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools campus now stands on the site and is publicly accessible, with informational markers that recount the history of the place.
The hotel hosted six Academy Awards ceremonies, a record among Los Angeles venues at the time. It also welcomed every sitting US president from Herbert Hoover to Richard Nixon, making it one of the rare places where the highest levels of politics and entertainment met year after year.
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