Union Station: The Last Great Terminal

Union Station opened in May nineteen thirty-nine as the last major railroad passenger terminal built in the United States. That record has held for more than eighty years and will almost certainly continue to hold. The age of building great train stations in America was over by the time this one opened.

Architects Donald and John Parkinson designed it in a blend of Mission Revival, Streamline Moderne, and Art Deco styles: mission courtyards with terra-cotta tile, an Art Deco waiting room with forty-foot ceilings, Moorish archways, dark wood paneling, leather seats. The waiting room is largely intact. At its peak in the nineteen forties, during wartime troop movements, Union Station handled tens of thousands of passengers a day.

Two things are less often mentioned. The first is that Union Station was built on the site of the original Chinatown, whose residents were displaced for the construction. The Chinatown that exists today, just north of the station, was built by the displaced community on different land. The original neighborhood is underneath the terminal's tracks.

The second is that Union Station nearly came down in the nineteen sixties, when rail travel collapsed and the building seemed like a large expensive liability. It was saved. It is now the western hub of Amtrak and Metrolink, the only grand-era terminal in Los Angeles still doing the work it was built for.