The $318 million plan, which must be approved in the coming months by the Los Angeles Unified School District, caps more than a decade of debate over the shuttered landmark.
Preservationists have fought doggedly to save the hotel — which played host to every U.S. president from Herbert Hoover to Richard Nixon — while a Mexican-American activist group has loudly campaigned to level it, saying that the mostly Latino students in surrounding neighborhoods deserve a new school.
Under the proposal most of the hotel, which was built in 1919 and closed in 1989, will be torn down to make way for a school serving students from kindergarten through high school.
Officials say they will preserve the look of the Ambassador by rebuilding its front wall. The Cocoanut Grove nightclub, a former home of the Academy Awards, would be kept as a performance hall. The ballroom where Kennedy spoke before his assassination in June of 1968 would be turned into a library.
Six bungalows, where such famous guests as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rudolph Valentino and Albert Einstein once stayed, would be razed, along with the hotel's ornate lobby.
School officials have not yet decided whether to preserve the hotel's pantry, where Kennedy was shot, recommending that a panel of experts be consulted on that issue.
