Opinion: Welcome to the Hotel California, for real

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Come on, now -- in this economic climate, with so much real estate going for a song, someone wants to spend the money to tear down one building and put up two? Two skyscrapers with all the usual blah-blah condos, shops, offices, hotel?

And it isn’t just any building they’re tearing down. It’s the Century Plaza Hotel. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has just selected it as one of the nation’s eleven most endangered places.

Oops. We’re not supposed to call it the Century Plaza any more; it’s the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza. Not to me, it isn’t. Try as they might, these companies that buy historic buildings strive to re-brand them, but the old name, the iconic name, always sticks. The Mann movie theatre company finally gave up on ‘’Mann’s Chinese’’ and restored it to splendor as ‘’Grauman’s Chinese.’’

The Century Plaza -- born, 1966, died, probably imminently -- has a storied if not gloried history, and a larger place in the nuanced politics of hotels. I am not joking. Hotels have politics. Democrats, liberal groups and causes drift to the Beverly Hills Hotel. In San Francisco, Republicans book the St. Francis, and Democrats have been fond of the Fairmont. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in Sacramento; for years, the GOP crossed picket lines to wine and dine at the Capitol Hyatt, and the Democrats put in a block’s more shoe-leather to get to the labor-friendlier Sheraton.

A Democratic president did hole up at the Century Plaza once. Lyndon Johnson -- by 1967, as hated by the left because of Vietnam -- was in residence when ten thousand anti-war protesters clamored in the streets below the glass swoop of a building. Police waded in with nightsticks, injured scores and arrested several dozen.

And after that, the Democrats left the hotel to the Republicans. Richard Nixon, as my colleague Martha Groves reported, wined and dined the first moon-landing Apollo astronauts there. Ronald Reagan treated it like an extension of the White House, and both Presidents Bush staged buoyant events there.

The King and Queen of Spain were staying there when the 1987 Whittier earthquake hit, and, given the uncertainties that early earthquake reporting engenders the farther you are from the epicenter, there were worries for a time that hardline old Fascists would try to take advantage of the moment to stage a coup against the democratically minded sovereign.

Just because we don’t have buildings that were put up when Marie Antoinette was still prancing around Versailles with her head still attached doesn’t mean we don’t have an architectural heritage in LA. The real investor who bought it less than a year ago said. ‘’A jewel in my hometown,’’ he called it. ‘’An icon,’’ he said.

Yeah, well. This is LA. You know how fast we cycle through our icons. Today’s jewel is tomorrow’s dingy rhinestone.

Nice try, but I’m not buying. I’m with the National Trust -- green the Century Plaza. Mend it, don’t end it. Make it work. Keep it ours.