The storied Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena, which was long considered one of the region’s top classical music venues, is for sale after being owned by a local church for the last two decades.

Harvest Rock Church is asking $45 million for the 1,200-seat auditorium near the Old Pasadena district that has also hosted jazz greats including Ella Fitzgerald, Dave Brubeck and Dizzy Gillespie. It has been called “the Carnegie Hall of the West” by fans.

The evangelical Christian Harvest Rock Church is based on the property and uses the auditorium for services. It also rents the venue to the Pasadena Symphony and the Colburn Orchestra as well as other performers that the church finds compatible with its religious mission.

The church recently paid off its mortgage on the property, Pastor Che Ahn said, and decided to sell it to make a move to a bigger facility somewhere in the Los Angeles region.

“We’re hoping that someone will buy it to really restore it to the original purpose and intent of that building,” he said.

The Ambassador Auditorium was intended to be a showplace for live performances when it opened in 1974. The Times called it “A new Taj Mahal for the arts.”

It was also the centerpiece for Ambassador College, operated by the Worldwide Church of God on a 40-acre campus near the intersection of Colorado and Orange Grove boulevards that has been largely redeveloped in recent years.

Harvest Rock Church and Maranatha High School bought a 13-acre portion of the campus site with five buildings including the auditorium from Worldwide Church of God in 2004 for an undisclosed amount. The auditorium controlled by Harvest Rock Church is assessed at $13.5 million, public records show.

Ambassador College founder Herbert W. Armstrong was a televangelist who set out to call attention to his ministry by building a lavish auditorium where he could broadcast services and host high-profile nonreligious events, including an opening performance by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra on April 7, 1974.

The auditorium made a big impression on local music aficionados, said Donna Perlmutter, who was a music critic at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner newspaper when it debuted.

“We were, at the time, bowled over by the presence of it,” she said. “It was to compare with any marvelous auditorium in Europe.”

That it had been created by a bombastic radio and television evangelist known for making dark end-times prophesies seemed unusual, she said.

“It was almost comical to think of who it was who erected this magnificent place,” Perlmutter said of Armstrong. “It was such a weird juxtaposition.”

Jazz greats who have performed in the 1,200-seat Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena include Ella Fitzgerald, Dave Brubeck and Dizzy Gillespie.

(Ambassador Foundation of Pasadena)

The acoustics are “optimal,” she said. “It bears a bright, undistorted sound. No singer could want more.”

The hall’s design by the architectural firm Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall (DMJM) strived for a mid-century version of glamour, with a main lobby chandelier composed of 100 custom bulbs and 1,390 crystals in three tiers of polished bronze.

Finishes include walls of Brazilian rosewood and rose onyx, African shedua wood railings and ceilings adorned with hand-rolled 24-carat gold leaf.

The auditorium is set in a 500,000-gallon water pond that holds a 37-foot solid bronze egret sculpture designed by British sculptor David Wynne, who also famously made a bronze sculpture of the Beatles’ busts in 1964 and is said to have introduced them to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Potential buyers of the auditorium include the city of Pasadena, private investors, or a group of investors seeking “to acquire a landmark with profound historical significance,” said real estate agent Isidora Fridman of Compass, who has the listing with Lauren Rauschenberg. The property at 131 S. St. John Ave. will officially go on the market July 9, Compass said.

The Hollywood Teamsters’ float at L.A. Pride was upholstered with sparkly blue fabric provided by a location manager who has worked on Peacock’s “Bel-Air” and Netflix’s “The Politician.”

The giant bubble letters were layered by a construction coordinator on Freeform’s “Good Trouble.” The horse heads were turned to gold by painters whose resumes include “Jerry Maguire” and “The Big Lebowski.” The rainbow jewels came directly from the set of Lionsgate’s upcoming Michael Jackson biopic.

Roughly one month after the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, or IATSE, the largest union representing Hollywood crew members, entered general contract negotiations with the major studios, a smaller coalition of below-the-line workers is stepping into the spotlight. And dozens of them took to the streets of Hollywood over the weekend to build LGBTQ+ and crew member solidarity ahead of their next round of bargaining.

“As far as you can see, there are people here who support equality, and that’s why we’re here,” said Chris Fuentes, a location manager and president of the Teamsters LGBTQ+ caucus. “In the end, it’s about equality and respect. We have to respect these workers and pay them what they’re worth.”

Teamsters Local 399 is part of the Hollywood Basic Crafts, which is scheduled to begin main contract talks with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers on Monday.

Union members are seeking wage increases, pension and health benefits, higher streaming residuals and protections against artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles for some 7,600 crew members — including animal trainers, casting directors, drivers, location managers, mechanics, cement masons and plumbers — employed on film and TV sets.

In addition to Teamsters Local 399, the union side (known collectively as the Hollywood Basic Crafts) consists of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 40, Laborers International Union of North America Local 724, United Assn. Plumbers Local 78 and the Operating Plasterers and Cement Masons International Assn. Local 755.

The studio side represents Amazon MGM, Apple, Disney, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Paramount, Sony, Warner Bros. Discovery and other companies. The AMPTP declined to comment for this story.

In early March, Teamsters Local 399 and the Hollywood Basic Crafts joined forces with IATSE to negotiate updates to their shared pension and health plan jointly for the first time in 36 years. Efforts to reach an agreement on that package are ongoing; pension and health benefits remain a sticking point in IATSE negotiations.

Now, the Hollywood Teamsters and Basic Crafts are back to bargain simultaneously for six contracts covering different groupings of crew members. The current below-the-line agreements are set to expire July 31.

The pressure to secure substantial financial gains is high in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Hollywood strikes of 2023 and an ongoing industry contraction — all of which have reduced employment opportunities for entertainment workers in recent years. According to Lindsay Dougherty, principal officer and chief negotiator of Teamsters Local 399, wage increases are a priority for the union even more than in past contract negotiations, “coming off of years of financial distress.”

“When I first got into this business 22 years ago, you could be a location manager, and your significant other could stay home. It was that good of a job,” said Jason McCauley, a location manager whose credits include HBO’s “Westworld” and Warner Bros.’ “Joker: Folie à Deux.” “These days, I can barely pay our bills working 60 hours a week or more.”

Safety and the hazards of working marathon shifts that can last 20-plus hours are also issues the unions are hoping to address, mainly by setting compensation standards that would deter employers from requiring crews to work overtime.

“If there are productions out there that are working our members with excessive hours … they should know that they’re going to have to pay to play,” Dougherty said. “They will not film as many hours if they know it’s going to cost them more money.”

Fears of another Hollywood walkout have softened somewhat as IATSE negotiations have transpired largely without incident. Dougherty joked that in a perfect world, the AMPTP would agree to all of the Hollywood Teamsters and Basic Crafts proposals, yielding a resolution Monday.

But the unions are prepared to bargain down to the wire if necessary.

“We went on strike one time in our history with these companies, and that was in 1988, so it’s possible to … bargain without having to strike,” Dougherty said. “It’s gonna take as long as it needs to.”

Second only to the Supreme Court’s ruling Monday on when presidents are immune from criminal prosecution, the biggest case of the court’s recently completed session involved the age-old conflict between judges and government regulators.

The case concerned a 40-year-old precedent known as “Chevron deference.” That doctrine held that when a federal law is ambiguous, the courts must defer to the interpretations offered by the agencies the law covers — as long as those interpretations are “reasonable.” On Monday, the court discarded Chevron deference.

This may sound like an abstruse legalistic squabble, but it has massive implications for Americans in all walks of life. It could subject agency decisions on scientifically based issues such as clean air and water regulations and healthcare standards to endless nitpicking by a federal judiciary that already has displayed an alarming willingness to dismiss scientific expertise out of hand, in favor of partisan or religious ideologies.

The ruling amounts to an apogee of arrogance on the part of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, wrote Justice Elena Kagan in a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. But it’s not a new development.

“The Court has substituted its own judgment on workplace health for that of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration,” Kagan wrote; “its own judgment on climate change for that of the Environmental Protection Agency; and its own judgment on student loans for that of the Department of Education…. In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue — no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden.”

Chevron deference originated in 1984, when environmentalists were fighting an effort by the EPA under Ronald Reagan to loosen clean air rules at the behest of industrial polluters. As it happens, the environmentalists lost that battle, but over time they won the war against deregulation.

Conservatives have had it in for Chevron deference for a long time; given their current majority on the court, the doctrine’s death has been a foregone conclusion, awaiting only the appearance of a suitable case to use as a bludgeon. Indeed, the majority was so impatient to kill the doctrine that the court’s six conservatives chose to do so by using a case that actually is moot.

That case arose from a lawsuit brought by the herring industry, which objected to a government policy requiring herring boats to pay for government observers placed on board to make sure the boats were complying with their harvesting permits.

The rule was imposed under the Trump administration, but it was canceled in April 2023 by Biden, who repaid the money that had been taken from the boat owners — so there’s nothing left in it for the court to rule on.

Interestingly, Chevron deference was not always seen as a bulwark protecting progressive regulatory policies from right-wing judges, as it’s viewed today. At its inception, it was seen in exactly the opposite way — as giving conservative policies protection from progressive-minded judges.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, which brought the original case in an effort to preserve Clean Air Act regulations that were being overturned by the Reagan administration, counted the 1984 ruling as a severe loss.

At issue then was the definition of a pollution “source.” Past practice defined it as a single building or smokestack; the administration wanted to redefine “source” broadly, as referring to an entire pollution-emitting plant. This wasn’t a trivial difference. The NRDC’s interpretation was more stringent than the government’s, for the latter allowed a polluter essentially to hide law-breaking emissions within an otherwise non-polluting plant.

The original Chevron ruling was 6 to 0 (three justices didn’t participate — two because of illness and the third, Sandra Day O’Connor, recused herself because of a conflict of interest). The ruling stated that when a federal law was ambiguous or silent on a particular issue, judges were bound to defer to the interpretation offered by the agency covered by the law, as long as its interpretation was “reasonable.”

One other thing: The functionary pushing to give industry more freedom to pollute was Reagan’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator, the late Anne Gorsuch. Name sound familiar? Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who is her son, lined up with the anti-Chevron majority. Curiously, he didn’t mention his family history in his separate concurrence — or perhaps not so curiously, because his mother was on the winning side of the decision that he has now voted to overturn.

In any event, Gorsuch’s words about the case in which his mother triumphed were telling. “Today,” he concluded gleefully, “the Court places a tombstone on Chevron no one can miss.”

The truth is that the Chevron ruling of 1984 and Monday’s ruling both served a goal shared by Anne Gorsuch and her offspring: providing federal judges all the leeway they might need to see things the way Big Business prefers.

Forty years ago, when the Reagan White House was pulling down a regulatory edifice that industry resented, the Supreme Court was happy to have judges defer to the agencies participating in that project, including Anne Gorsuch’s EPA. Today, when the deregulatory process is opposed by government agencies that take seriously their duty to make life better for the average consumer, the court tells judges that they’re free to ignore agency findings.

In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. called Chevron “misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.”

This is self-refuting. Chevron deference isn’t about “resolving ambiguities” in the law. It’s about recognizing that sometimes those ambiguities are deliberate — put in place by lawmakers who know they can’t possibly write a law that covers all situations from now to the end of time. The “ambiguities” are there because Congress wishes that the agencies it has charged with fulfilling its goals use their technical and scientific knowledge to meet the challenges of a changing world.

Things have indeed changed. Generally speaking, wrote legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein in 2019, environmentalists and other progressives saw the original decision as “a capitulation to the (insufficiently zealous) administrative state, which was often captured by powerful private interests.” Today, the right wing portrays the “administrative state” as a shadowy cabal bent on thwarting the will of the people (that is, conservative policies). “The right and the left have switched sides,” Sunstein observed.

Chevron deference was very much a product of its time, Sunstein noted. In the 1960s and 1970s, “federal courts had been aggressively reviewing agency action (and inaction), often with the goal of producing greater regulation.” Typically, “the judges were on the political left.”

They had grown up professionally in the atmosphere created by the Warren court, which fostered the notion that the courts existed to protect and extend individual rights. “To their defenders,” Sunstein wrote, “the lower federal courts assumed a kind of heroic stance.”

This was the era that brought us an unprecedented, judicially driven expansion of individual rights, through such decisions as Griswold vs. Connecticut (1965), which established the right of married couples to use contraceptives without state interference; Loving vs. Virginia (1967), which invalidated laws against interracial marriage; and of course Roe vs. Wade (1973), which established the nationwide right to abortion.

The current conservative majority has already begun to roll back this historic approach to individual rights, most notably through the Dobbs decision of 2022, which overturned Roe vs. Wade.

Justice Clarence Thomas has suggested that Griswold should follow Roe vs. Wade into the juridical dumpster, along with Lawrence vs. Hodges (2003), which invalidated state laws against sodomy among consenting adults, and Obergefell vs. Hodges (2005), which legalized same-sex marriages nationwide. The court, Thomas remarked in his concurring opinion in Dobbs, “should reconsider” those rulings.

Those cases were decided on different grounds from Chevron, but liberal judges saw the expansion of individual rights as part of the same principle that prompted them to aggressively examine agency actions that tended to narrow those rights.

As it happens, the Chevron decision didn’t generate much interest when it was handed down. The six justices who ruled unanimously in the EPA’s favor apparently thought they were weighing in on a narrow technicality. One legal scholar has called Chevron an “accidental landmark”; its significance only emerged from subsequent federal rulings and, perhaps most important, its embrace by Justice Antonin Scalia, who joined the Supreme Court two years later.

Scalia wrote in a 1989 law review article that Chevron deference made sense in the modern world: If there was an ambiguity in the law, the reason was either that Congress was sloppy (in which case the courts had the duty to say what a law meant) or that the lawmakers deliberately delegated to agencies the task of responding to changing realities by using their “advancing knowledge.” Over time, to be sure, he grew discontented with the doctrine (as Roberts and Gorsuch took pains to point out.)

Monday’s decision puts the lie to conservatives’ oft-expressed disdain for policies made by “unelected” bureaucrats. “Agencies report to a President, who in turn answers to the public for his policy calls; courts have no such accountability,” Kagan wrote. Calling the decision “a bald assertion of judicial authority, she added: “The majority disdains restraint, and grasps for power.”

That’s not to say that the majority won’t share the power they have now arrogated for themselves. They will walk hand-in-hand with the Big Business leaders and conservative ideologues who put them on the court, and the rest of us will just have to live with the consequences.