Landscape Architect Tommy Tomson Dies; Designed Santa Anita Infield
The self-taught landscape architect who designed the infield at Santa Anita Race Track and placed the semitropical plants and vines in the patios that visitors to Los Angeles first saw when they got off trains at the opening of Union Station in 1939, is dead.
Tommy Tomson was 85 and until a recent hospitalization had lived in the hacienda he created above Palm Desert--a city he also helped design.
Designer of homes for such film figures as Samuel Goldwyn, Henry Fonda, Ronald Colman and Charles Boyer and aviation pioneer Donald Douglas, Tomson was a railroad surveyor who migrated from Texas to Los Angeles in 1920 to work for an architect.
By 1934 he had received a commission to landscape the grounds and design the infield at Santa Anita, which opened that year. Another of his better-known local projects is Park La Brea Apartments.
Survivors include two daughters, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
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