An essay celebrating the station while regretting what might have been.
Who could cross the country by rail today without dreaming of a distant, more glamorous, wholly lost, and perhaps even partially imaginary era of American train travel? Who, indeed, could set foot in Los Angeles' Union Station without doing the same? The building itself, built in 1939, is a palm-surrounded hybrid of Dutch Colonial Revival, Spanish Mission Colonial Revival, and Streamline Moderne, designed by John Parkinson, the English expat architect responsible also for City Hall, Bullock's Wilshire, and the Memorial Coliseum. As the last of the country's major railway terminals, it first made for a monument, and soon a memorial, to the heyday of passenger trains in the United States. Well-kept up even now, and seemingly always undergoing some type of restorative maintenance, Union Station at moments evokes the road not taken, one leading to, say, New York in an afternoon, rather than in 63 hours. ...
Just as the once-exhilarating promise of a long-distance train journey has become an occasion for preemptive despondency, so does Union Station feel at once grand and forlorn. Its original bold aesthetic vision, right down to its original weighty furniture, has survived, pulling through even its decades of near-desertion in the sixties, seventies, and eighties....
Some of the discomfort felt in Union Station has to do with the confused energy of a space that doesn't know who to play to. Its architecture, its respected place in history, and its well-regarded bar and restaurant say one thing; its actual function, since the demotion of rail to the second class at best, says another. ...
