Los Angeles Union Station

Los Angeles Union Station--opened on May 7, 1939, after days of celebration--was the last great train station built in the United States. Intended as a grand portal to a grand Los Angeles, it was an anomaly, built at a time when America was eager to drive or fly to its chosen destinations. Protected by early inclusion on the National Registry of Historic Places for its iconic architecture, Los Angeles Union Station has had an astonishing and unpredictable rebirth. As the city modernizes its public transportation system linking the culturally and geographically diverse communities of Southern California, Union Station--in all its Mission Revival glory--is suddenly the hub of the country's newest light rail and subway system, serving hundreds of thousands of people each week. Where Pullman cars and Harvey Girls once served commuters, where the Super Chief and the Coast Starlight, Streamliners and Domeliners converged, Los Angeles Union Station is now a living-breathing center of transportation modernity.Author William Bradley relates a rich history of fierce battles, cultural relocation, and astounding financial risks culminating in one of California's most important stories. Augmenting his words with vintage images, Bradley not only shares the tale of the terminal, but of the trains that rode its tracks--those 1939 tracks to the future.

Union Station today is a celebrated architectural icon and vibrant centerpiece of Los Angeles’s regional transportation network. Designed by John and Donald B. Parkinson, its mission revival architecture speaks to a mythic vision of Spanish heritage, but with streamline moderne and art deco details. At first glance this masterpiece, conceived as a magnificent gateway to the growing metropolis, offers no hint of the civic, financial, and legal battles surrounding its development, siting, style, and construction—battles that were waged across decades in the early twentieth century and that went as high as the U.S. Supreme Court. Los Angeles Union Station explores this compelling example of how transit and corporations disrupted regional balances of power and political economies. Aided by new research and beautiful drawings from the Getty Research Institute’s archive, the authors demonstrate how contentious politics informed architectural design—and the many ways in which Union Station was at the heart of the rise of Los Angeles. The book accompanies the exhibition No Further West, on view at the Los Angeles Public Library from May 2 through August 10, 2014.

Recipient of the Jo Anne Stolaroff Cotsen Prize Excavation of the Chinatown that was destroyed in the building of Union Station provides a rich picture of the people and life in nineteenth and early twentieth century Los Angeles. Intensive historical research, oral history, and laboratory analyses have been synthesized into a comprehensive reconstruction of a community that was isolated socially, economically, and geographically.