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Behind the Scenes and Through the Years at L.A.’s Union Station
Posted by Julie Jaskol on Jun 9th 2026
Behind the Scenes and Through the Years at L.A.’s Union Station
By Julie Jaskol | June 9, 2026 | Photography by Christopher Gonzalez
LOS ANGELES—Go behind the heavy locked door, up a steep metal staircase, along a narrow catwalk, through another heavy locked door, and you are about halfway up Los Angeles’ Union Station’s clock tower, in a chamber of treasures.
Numerals, letters, track numbers, exit signs, decorative grills, brackets, clock faces, glass and metal light fixtures, and chandeliers line steel shelves. The cramped, high-ceilinged room houses hundreds of objects that have helped direct and light the way for millions of train passengers streaming through the station since it opened in 1939.
“There is an enormous amount of signage,” George Meyer said. He's the former station manager who collected these objects from all over the station. “They used eight different types of lettering over 80 years.”
Next to the shelves stand old metal filing cabinets that contain handwritten or typed records of every Union Station employee or contractor from its construction until the computer age. Other cabinets include carbon copies of typed meeting notes about the station’s mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems.
All these items were jumbled in a variety of storage areas when Meyer arrived on the scene in 2021. “Some of it was very organized and some was not at all,” he said. But in one of those rare and fortunate confluences of events, Meyer was the right guy at the right time to create order out of semi-chaos.
“I have a special interest in how operations work and the organization of things—how to wisely use your space,” he said. He also has a special interest in historic preservation. He serves as board treasurer of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy and he and his husband are restoring their own Craftsman bungalow in Long Beach.
At Union Station he found himself overseeing a major drainage system construction project that required clearing out the basement. “The project disrupted everything, so it created an ideal opportunity,” he said. “I had the budget and the labor. Instead of putting all that stuff back in the basement, we were able to move some of it into the tower.”
He had to sell his bosses on the idea, “but it was an easy sell,” he said. “The most difficult part was moving the stuff. It required a lot of labor, and it was not cheap to do. But we seized the moment.”
The tower room was the perfect spot for an archive. “It was completely empty,” Meyer said. “Dry, temperate, thick concrete walls. Safe and secure. Not in the way of people doing things.”
Its remote location was a mixed blessing, however. Not everything could make the trip up the narrow stairway into the tower. “We left things in the basement that were too big, like a massive clock, or too heavy, like crates of tile,” he said. “But everything needed to be organized.”
Still in the basement are chairs from the cavernous station waiting room and the colorful geometric tiles that line the station’s interiors, designed by muralist and decorator Herman Sachs and manufactured by Gladding McBean. Most of these are actually modern reproductions on hand to replace worn or broken originals. In a corner, carefully labeled, remain some of the original tiles, containing elevated levels of lead that require special handling according to today’s standards.
Documents and artifacts from the history of Los Angeles' Union Station rest in the newly created clock-tower archive. The project was overseen and curated by retired station manager George Meyer.
These tiles, the lighting fixtures, the distinctive signage, and other accessories collected and carefully stored in the clock tower are part of what makes Union Station one of LA’s most enduring and beloved landmarks.
Designed by father and son architects John and Donald Parkinson, who also designed Los Angeles City Hall and Bullocks Wilshire, Union Station features a uniquely Southern California blend of Spanish Colonial, Mission Revival, and Art Deco that Meyer likes to call “LA Mishmash.”
When it opened in 1939, with a three-day celebration attended by half a million Angelenos, or roughly one-third of the city’s population at the time, Union Station proved to be exactly what city leaders hoped it would be: a glorious welcome to the City of Angels. With its arched doorways, soaring painted ceilings, and vast windows looking onto lush, tiled patios, it signaled that passengers had arrived at an exciting and glamorous destination, different from any other American city.
It was the largest terminal in the Western United States and the last of America’s great railroad stations. From its opening, 66 trains carried 7,000 passengers through the terminal every day. During wartime, the daily total increased by 100 troop trains, carrying tens of thousands of servicemen, war workers, the wounded and the dead.
And yet, just 18 months after Union Station’s opening, Los Angeles cut the ribbon on its first freeway, the Arroyo Seco Parkway. From that time forward, Los Angeles invested primarily in its growing freeway network, rather than rail. By the 1960s, just 18 trains a day moved through the terminal. Union Station’s grand Harvey House restaurant, designed by Mary Coulter, closed. By the 1970s mail and freight no longer moved through. The increasingly shabby and empty terminal was no longer anyone’s idea of a portal to the future.
But even as it edged into decline, Union Station’s ceilings still soared, its tiles remained intact under the growing grime, and the ornate grillwork remained in place over the cloudy windows. In the 1990s, Los Angeles welcomed Metro Rail, a new subway and light rail system with stops at Union Station. In 2011 Metro acquired the station and set about shining it up. Today it serves as a regional hub for Amtrak and Metrolink commuter trains, as well as LA Metro bus, rail, and subway lines. And once again the tiles, chandeliers, and grillwork gleam; the painted ceilings are bright; and Union Station attracts visitors from all over.
“It’s hard to explain the interest people have in Union Station from all over the world, even countries in Europe that have beautiful stations on every corner,” Meyer said. “There’s still the lure of trains, even though we don’t use them like we used to. There’s something nostalgic and American. LA doesn’t have a lot of historical landmarks that people immediately think of, but Union Station is at the center of LA, and LA Metro has really invested in it so that it’s so beautiful.”
For Meyer, the meticulously organized clock tower archive represents his lasting contribution to Union Station and the people who will keep it preserved. “The preservation and organization of these objects is my crowning achievement,” he said. “I have to think about the future generations of people doing this job 30 years from now.”
Recently retired, Meyer hopes one of his first projects in retirement will be an exhibit in the waiting room of some of the historic items they’ve uncovered and inventoried.
And in the meantime, whenever one of Union Station’s historic accessories needs fixing or replacing, folks know exactly where to find it: behind locked doors, up narrow stairs, and neatly organized in the clock tower.
Julie Jaskol lives in Los Angeles and writes about art and architecture. She is co-author of City of Angels: In and Around Los Angeles.