LOS ANGELES - The historic Ambassador Hotel will be torn down in order to build a new Los Angeles Unified School District campus, a Los Angeles County Superior court judge ruled Tuesday.

The 24-acre property will now house a facility serving 4,200 kindergarten through high school students. The school board had voted in October 2004 to build the campus but the Los Angeles Conservancy and other organizations filed suit to stop construction citing the district’s failure to comply with environmental quality laws.

The Ambassador Hotel and Cocoanut Grove located on 3400 Wilshire Blvd. opened in 1921 and quickly became a celebrity hotspot. On April 3, 1930, the first gold Oscar statuette was handed out during the third Academy Awards in the Grove, which held a total of six Academy Award ceremonies. The rich and famous, such as Howard Hughes and F. Scott Fitzgerald, had permanent suites. The hotel became a site of national tragedy in 1968 when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated while leaving the Ambassador through the pantry.

“The Ambassador Hotel is one of the defining historic sites of Los Angeles,” Ken Bernstein, Director of Preservation Issues for L.A. Conservancy said. “It literally put Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles' most important commercial corridor, on the map, as Wilshire was a dirt road when the Ambassador was being constructed, from 1919 to 1921.”

Attorneys fighting for the campus and the LAUSD lauded the decision.

“We are proponents of historic preservation,” Victor Viramontes, staff attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, one of the central proponents of the new campus, said. “We just don’t want it at the expense of the education of children.”

“The kids are the winners in this situation,” LAUSD Facility Spokesperson Shannon Johnson added.

Johnson and Viramontes said over 3,800 students in the immediate area have to be bussed out to different schools, with a commute of up to 4-5 hours. Using the Ambassador site means no homes or business have to be relocated and children can be close to a school in a heavily populated area. Johnson added the surrounding community as a whole, not just children, benefit from the decision.

“All of our schools are centers for communities,” Johnson said, citing after-school activities and public use of the auditorium and other facilities in the evenings.

Bernstein said The L.A. Conservancy worked to develop a plan for the site that meets all of LAUSD's goals and when the School District voted 4-3 to demolish all but the Cocoanut Grove portion of the Ambassador, the Conservancy began working toward a new plan, which would reuse the main building of the Ambassador for 165 units of affordable housing and for a community center in the hotel's public spaces, while building all-new facilities for 4,240 students on the 18 acres of the site surrounding the main building.

“The Conservancy is disappointed by the court's decision and is considering all options,” Bernstein said. “Including a possible appeal to the State Court of Appeals, which would hear the case in another six to nine months.”

“No other site could house that amount of students anywhere else in the city,” Viramontes said. “”This is a fantastic victory for schoolchildren who have been waiting for this site for 17 years.”

As for the hotel, which closed in 1989, and its place in history, the final curtain call may be near.

“The Ambassador was the living room and backyard for Hollywood," Bernstein said. “[It was] the hangout of virtually every major Hollywood personality from the 1920s through the 1960s.”