HAWTHORNE:
She was once a grande dame of society, hosting a U.S. president, A-list movie stars and entertainers, the Mafia and, more recently, aerospace workers, jockeys and horse-racing aficionados.
But the years took a toll, and she’s now a forgotten relic – a footnote of a bygone era to some, an eyesore to others.
Her future is anybody’s guess.
Built at Imperial Highway and Hawthorne Boulevard in the 1950s by reputed Mafia associate Andrew Lococo, Hawthorne’s Cockatoo Inn quickly became one of the South Bay’s premier hot spots, featuring 210 guest rooms and numerous meeting rooms amid sprawling grounds laid out like a secret garden.
It gained a reputation for fine food, grand banquet halls and elegant European decor, including an L-shaped bar of brass and red leather. Male patrons were not allowed in without neckties.
President Kennedy stayed there, as did his Air Force One pilots and his younger brother, Robert. A photo of the presidential plane, autographed by its pilots, still hangs on a hotel wall, Mayor Larry Guidi said.
One rumor has it that the Kennedy brothers brought Marilyn Monroe to Room 200 for a discreet rendezvous. Another is that a secret tunnel, used only by select celebrities, runs from the kitchen basement to the villa in the center of the 4-acre complex.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the hotel grew popular among underworld figures, a Justice Department official testified at the time. Around then, the Daily Breeze ran stories describing an odd relationship among Lococo, police in Milwaukee, where Lococo previously lived, and Hawthorne.
Milwaukee police, the reports said, stayed at the Cockatoo when they came to California to extradite prisoners. One prisoner described a surreal scene in which a Milwaukee detective picked him up at the Los Angeles County jail in a gold Cockatoo Inn station wagon, took him to the hotel for lunch, and then had a Cockatoo bellhop drive him to the Hawthorne jail in a limousine.
The prisoners and others complained that they were left for days at the Hawthorne jail while the detectives partied at the Cockatoo.
In 1972, Lococo served three months in prison for lying to a federal grand jury investigating horse-race fixing and bribery. He died the same year.
After investors bought the property, the hotel shed its Mafia image but continued to be popular among high rollers from Hollywood Park, horse trainers and jockeys. It also catered to military and corporate travelers visiting the South Bay’s aerospace facilities, as well as community groups and politicians, who held fund-raisers there.
Former Assemblyman Dick Floyd, who represented Hawthorne, called it “my home away from home.”
It witnessed its fair share of behind-the-scenes intrigue, too. In 1985, a Northrop Corp. employee was sentenced to life in prison after trying to sell military secrets to an undercover agent in a meeting at the Cockatoo bar.
In the late 1980s, the owners embarked on a $1 million renovation of the property to help it compete with the new hotels sprouting up on Century Boulevard east of Los Angeles International Airport. But the hotel’s glory days were over.
Its fortunes began to decline in the 1990s, when the recession decimated the aerospace industry and surrounding neighborhoods deteriorated. Hawthorne sued the Cockatoo in 1991 for $109,000 in unpaid bed taxes, and the owners declared bankruptcy the next year.
A corporation bought the hotel, and enjoyed some initial success, with occupancy rates climbing to 60 percent during peak tourist seasons. But it, too, gave up on the business two years later, closing the hotel in December 1994.
Just days later, investors from the People’s Republic of China bought the property out of receivership for $3.2 million, and reopened it in January 1995. The investors initially planned to turn it into a Howard Johnson hotel, said interim City Manager Charles Herbertson.
While Hawthorne’s Kiwanis and Rotary clubs continued to hold their meetings there, the new owners were unable to turn the business into a profitable enterprise and it continued to decay. It shut down for good in 1996.
In the late 1990s, Hawthorne officials learned that people were living there without electricity or running water.
“We had to go in there and basically evict people who were living in there illegally,” Herbertson said. “It was really bad.”
Other entrepreneurs have offered different proposals for the site – including another hotel, low- and moderate-income housing and senior housing – but those never materialized either.
“Several times we met with people who were going to buy it,” Herbertson said.
In 2001, the Hawthorne School District considered buying the site, and several acres of surrounding property, for a new middle school. But state funding for that plan didn’t materialize.
The hotel’s fixtures are still in place. But reopening it as a hotel would cost at least $5.5 million in building code upgrades including new sprinklers and renovations to make it fully accessible to disabled people, Guidi said.
City officials believe a better use for the property would be a mixed-use commercial-retail redevelopment, Guidi said.
“The sad part is it’s not in the right side of town to reopen as a hotel,” Guidi said. “If it was in any other part of the city, that would happen right away.”
Tanks begin to appear on the landscape in this circa 1911 view of the El Segundo refinery property, with tree-lined Rosecrans Avenue in the foreground.
An aerial view of the Chevron U.S.A. refinery in El Segundo taken in 2000.
Daily The Cockatoo Inn hosted all types of visitors before its closure in December 1994.
