I'm a big fan of train stations, and Los Angeles has one of the nation's most beautifully preserved. The outdoor clocks work, too!
California light floods into Union Station through enormous windows.
It serves more than 100,000 passengers daily, making it the busiest station in the western United States although you'd never know it from the grand, palm-tree lined driveway in front.
Mission style architecture characterizes an outdoor passage leading to a restaurant.
Everything inside--including the marble floors, inlaid with mosaic--gleams as if it had been waxed or polished 20 minutes earlier.
This enormous, obsolete ticketing area, is mostly used now for special events and location shooting. That's probably how the singularly spacious and glamorous station seeped into my consciousness before I ever stepped inside.
Ugly orange but probably necessary stanchions enclose the waiting area where only ticketed passengers are permitted.
Thom couldn't get over the chairs.
I couldn't get over the tiles.
The rotunda just beyond the waiting area is pretty impressive, too.
We took the LA Metro downstairs. It appeared that many commuters bring bikes because the system, though modern and well-maintained, has many fewer station's than New York's. Thom took this photo, surreptitiously.
Still, it beats the bus! And cheap, too. After purchasing $1 tap cards (one was branded with Juneteenth), it cost only $0.70 for our round trip fares to Pershing Square.
If we'd loaded our tap cards with more value, we could have gotten a 50% discount on the Angel's Flight cable car that took us on the next stage of our public transportation journey.
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