LA Design Festival - Union Station
The final event in my LA Design Festival weekend was an art-and-architecture tour of Union Station, Los Angeles Metro's downtown hub. Unlike the other events, this one turned out not to be exclusive to the design festival. It is actually a regularly occurring event, every second Sunday of the month, that just happens to overlap the LA Design Festival this weekend. Which is great because it was good enough for me to consider doing again sometime in the future.
Most of the tour went through areas that anyone traveling through Union Station can stop by and visit, with the notable exception of its ticketing hall. Long since made obsolete by automated ticketing machines, it is now an event venue that is usually closed to the traveling public. The tour does go into the area, though not very far into it and not very thoroughly. Still, it was a fun novelty.
The tour is given by volunteers wearing bright orange vests, mostly reciting from a script but the personal style of delivery matters. Given the overlap with LA Design Festival, today's crowd was larger than usual so they split us up into two groups. I chose go to with the guide who was more verbally articulate.
The tour went from the front door, to the ticketing hall where I took the above picture. We then covered the adjacent space that was formerly a restaurant and is planned to become a brewery. There were two gardens that I never knew about, and the waiting area leather couches reserved for ticketed MetroLink and Amtrak passengers only.
This was the first time Union Station was the destination rather than a transfer point. I usually arrive via Metro Gold Line and in a rush to transfer to something else. Which explained why, despite traveling through the Gold Line archway many times, I never noticed the tile mosaic artwork representing sunrise and sunset. This is only one of many Union Station features that I never stopped to notice until today.
Another piece of trivia came when we stopped off at an aquarium inside the station. It had a Garibaldi fish (just one because they are very territorial) and here is where I learned Garibaldi is California's official state fish. I've lived on Garibaldi Ave. and never thought to ask what the name meant - I had always assumed it was named after a person whose significance was lost to California history, but today I learned otherwise.
The tour was over an hour long, the final stop was inside LA Metro's headquarters building right off Union Station's north plaza. There were several more pieces of art inside the building that I didn't know was publicly accessible. These and other rotating exhibits inside the station makes me think I'll have enough to keep me occupied the next time I have some time to kill waiting at Union Station. (Probably waiting for LAX FlyAway.)
If nothing else, I got some great pictures that will become new desktop backgrounds for my computer.
