Instead of Hotel Prague, there will be a private school park, PPF stated

Prague - At the site of Hotel Praha in Prague's Hanspaulka, against whose planned demolition some civic associations are protesting, there will be a private park of the Open Gate school. Vladimír Mlynář, the director for public sector relations of the PPF group, which now owns the hotel, informed journalists about this today. Civic associations want to declare the hotel a cultural monument, and protest gatherings against the demolition of the building are also planned for this afternoon.
    The park at the site of the hotel will not be accessible to the public as part of the private school. "The Open Gate school building will rise at the bottom in the neighboring area of the former residence of the Canadian ambassador, as well as in the location where there are currently dilapidated garages," added Mlynář.
    The new owner intends to start demolishing the hotel in winter, but does not yet have all the necessary permits. "According to an optimistic estimate, the demolition work should take six months," stated Mlynář. The plan to demolish the hotel was announced by PPF in mid-June. Shortly before that, the Ministry of Culture decided not to initiate proceedings on whether Hotel Praha could be a cultural monument.
    Mlynář denied information that PPF was destroying the hotel's furnishings, which are considered valuable by some art historians. "We took over the hotel completely empty. The former Armenian owner sold all the movable furnishings of the hotel, such as all the chairs, sofas, and even removed the golden faucets. Everything that could be taken away was taken," Mlynář stated. According to him, PPF took over the property on June 27, while the authors of the proposal to declare the hotel a monument claimed that demolition-related work at the hotel had been ongoing since June 14.
    Valuable chandeliers by Stanislav Libenský and Pavel Hlavy were reportedly dismantled and are now stored in the hotel building. "We offered them to the Museum of the Capital City of Prague, the Arts and Crafts Museum in Prague, and the Gallery of the Capital City of Prague, but no one was interested in most of them," he noted.
    According to the authors of the proposal to declare the hotel a monument, the hotel is a work of art with timeless architectural and artistic values that should be preserved. However, municipal heritage experts stated that while the hotel is indeed a quality modernist building, its dimensions deviate from the given part of Dejvice, and the building cannot be "unequivocally and unreservedly evaluated as an architectural and urban contribution of its time."