Union Station Helped Turn a City Into a Metropolis

Union Station, a monument to the entwined elements of history and transportation, was a Johnny-come-lately as train stations go, but it played a leading role in making Los Angeles into the nation’s second-largest city.

For more than a century, the mighty transcontinental railroads had helped to transform Los Angeles from an isolated town of 10,000 into a modern megalopolis. But getting them to unite behind a single station, a Union Station, was a task almost as difficult as bringing the railroads west. In 1869, railroad workers drove the golden spike at Promontory, Utah, joining the Union Pacific and the Southern Pacific into a seamless transcontinental route.

The same year, Gen. Phineas Banning built the first railway south of the Tehachapi Mountains: the San Pedro & Los Angeles Railroad. On the locomotive, a sign painter lettered “LOS ANGELOS,” an error discovered in the nick of time for the maiden run.

Banning’s railway covered the 22 miles between San Pedro and downtown. The line, with its station at Alameda and Commercial streets, provided the city’s only service for a decade. In 1873, the line was turned over to the Southern Pacific to entice the big railroad to come to Los Angeles. (Banning’s station would become a flag stop for the Southern Pacific; travelers had to flag down the train to get aboard. That station was torn down in 1888.)

On Sept. 5, 1876, the Golden State’s own golden spike connecting north and south was driven at Lang Station in what is now Santa Clarita. The Southern Pacific--called “the Espee” for its initials and immortalized as “The Octopus” for its stranglehold on state politics in Frank Norris’ novel of the same name--finally chugged into Los Angeles.

No other single California company ever held the power and influence that the Southern Pacific did. For more than three decades, its slightest decision about where to lay tracks and where not to created some cities and destroyed others.

In 1880, in an area halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco called Mussel Slough, a dispute over land rights between settlers and the Southern Pacific erupted into violence, leaving seven men dead. The brief bullet-punctuated episode became a turning point, as public outrage swelled against the powerful railroad.

Over the next several decades, the SP operated out of three grand train stations, beginning with the Los Angeles Junction, which boasted a hotel and dining room in an area known as “the Cornfield,” bound by Spring Street and North Broadway. In 1888, the SP moved to the Arcade Station at 5th and Central streets, which was rebuilt on an adjoining site three decades later and called Central Station. (Although the SP began making stops at a storefront brick building called the River Station in Chinatown in 1884, it was only a flag stop, not one of its three main stations.)

Two more railroads would battle the SP for a foothold in the West, and each had its own station. In 1891, the Los Angeles Terminal Railway Station--whose title spawned the name for Terminal Island--opened on East 1st Street, just east of the Los Angeles River. After changing its name to the San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake, it eventually was swallowed up by Union Pacific. When the station burned down in 1924, Union Pacific moved to Central Station.

The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad also joined the fray--sometimes literally. More than once, Santa Fe and SP workmen faced off against each other with rifles.

In 1885, the SP paid the Santa Fe, which had reached San Diego, $500,000 a year to make San Bernardino its terminus instead of Los Angeles, to keep competition away. Their pact lasted only two years, when the Santa Fe acquired a route, becoming the third railroad line into the city and triggering a half-century-long conflict.

Travelers benefited from vicious fare wars. Thousands of settlers came to Los Angeles from as far away as Kansas, some on tickets that, for a few hours in 1887, sold for one dollar.

Six years later, the Santa Fe’s Moorish-style La Grande Station opened, between 1st and 2nd streets on Santa Fe Avenue. It had a first-class restaurant, the Harvey House, which was Judy Garland’s fictional employer in the 1945 MGM movie “The Harvey Girls.” Garland sang: “Do ya hear that whistle down the line? I figure that it’s engine No. 49. She’s the only one that’ll sound that way. On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.”

Trains were the chief mode of transport for goods and passengers, bringing their share of glamour to Hollywood. Once in the 1930s, actress Mae West arrived aboard the Santa Fe’s Super Chief.

After posing for photographers, she was met by a handsome deputy district attorney, who had been sent to escort her by her friend, Dist. Atty. Buron Fitts. Fitts had ordered the man to give her a big kiss and say, “This is from Buron”--to which West issued her classic bawdy rejoinder: “Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?”

A politically connected pimp ran a prostitution business near the train stations for years. His “girls” took out ads, such as those that appeared in the “Souvenir Sporting Guide” published in 1897, colorfully describing prostitutes’ services. His lucrative deal ended in 1913 with the Red Light Abatement Act.

The railroad tracks ran right down Alameda, uneasily coexisting with trolleys and other vehicles. In 1915, after years of fatal accidents, several city agencies that were seeking a joint terminal and a new track location filed a complaint against the three railways with the California Railroad Commission. The panel intervened, prompting a decade-long court battle.

Finally, the presidents of all three railroads grudgingly agreed to pay for a terminal, which was named Union Station to symbolize their reluctant cooperation.

City voters approved the new station in 1926, but it took almost a decade to agree on the 48-acre site and raze part of Chinatown.

On May 3, 1939, half a million people attended the opening of Union Station, which took six years and $11 million to build.

Opening-day ceremonies culminated in a historical parade featuring horsemen, muleskinners, stagecoaches, horse-car trolleys and California’s first smoke-belching locomotive, the Southern Pacific’s No. 1 engine of 1869, chugging down the tracks that still ran right down the street. (However, by then passenger trains no longer used those rails.)

For three days, crowds streamed through the station, rubbernecking at its ornate, 52-foot ceilings; its rows of deep, hardwood waiting-room chairs with leather cushions; its ticket concourse with 30 windows; enormous restrooms; two courtyards with native trees and plants; and the sumptuous Harvey House restaurant and adjoining bar. During World War II, the restaurant could feed 800 people an hour.

Critics nicknamed the station’s architectural style “mission moderne.” The Spanish heritage was evident in its exterior design. Architects H.L. Gilman, J.H. Christie and R.J. Wirth created a Moorish clock tower, high-arched windows and slanted red-tile roofs. The influence of the consulting architects, the father and son team of John and Donald Parkinson, was reflected in the many Art Deco touches.

Soon, 64 passenger trains a day were passing through, bearing names like the Chief, the Super Chief, the Sunset Limited, the Lark, the Golden State, the Desert Wind and the City of Los Angeles.

Throughout World War II, dramas of tearful departures and joyous homecomings played out thousands of times a day in Union Station. Troops came and went around the clock as the number of trains increased to 100 a day. Lines waiting to board were backed up through the cavernous waiting room.

After the war, Union Station began receiving a tide of refugees. Thousands of Jews and Central Europeans freed from Nazi concentration camps poured in on train rides that ended in freedom rather than death.

Scared and shabbily dressed children with nametags waited in anticipation for their new adoptive families as volunteers from the Travelers Aid Society held their hands.

But the glory days were long gone by 1971, when Amtrak took over passenger operations.

Competition from airlines and cars had reduced the station to an average of seven passenger trains a day, just as long-distance trucking had put a dent in railroads’ freight business. And the venerable Harvey House had closed four years before.

But the past proved to be prologue. In recent years, Union Station has been revived as a dining and shopping mall and as a transit hub.

Amtrak, bus lines, the Red Line subway, Metrolink trains, van pools and taxi and shuttle services converge every day, again bringing commuters and tourists into the City of Angels.