Unionization

Today I went to see the floats from the 125th Tournament of Roses Parade. I took the Metro Red Line from North Hollywood to end-of-the-line at Union Station, then the Gold Line from there to end-of-the-line at Sierra Madre Villa. It wasn’t until the trip back that I realized I was heading through UNION Station. The architectural style uses southwest motifs and the occasional Arts & Crafts detail, which made me expect that it was an early 1900 design. That UNION, though ... Either it comes from the Union Pacific Railroad, named in the early 1860s to represent its source in the non-Confederate United States, or it is directly referencing that same political entity for similar reasons. 

We easily ignore the very definite references used in so many place names around us, all the time. The floats themselves were at Victory Park, not to be confused with Memorial Park (one of the stops on the Gold Line), nor with Victory Boulevard (significant enough to be the San Fernando Valley’s shout-out in Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.”). I would not be at all surprised to find that all three represent completely different wars. I doubt they are related to the war that Union Station gets its name from, though: Besides California being a Free state, there was little enough that happened here which would be worth memorializing. The name of Union Station is a reminder, though, that the war was different in kind from others of that century, and important enough to be worth naming the primary terminus of railways from across the continent. You weren’t to forget, it appears, that it was the Union, together, that made it all possible. 

And sometimes .. you would be completely wrong. In this case, “Union” has nothing to do with the war: It’s a generic term for a station owned jointly by several railway companies that share expenses for a single terminus. The one in Los Angeles actually opened in May 1939 - coincidentally, just a couple of months after the publication of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” - and was one of the last such built. While we’re at it “Memorial Park” actually was dedicated, in 1906,  to the defenders of the Union. Victory Park refers to World War II, while Victory Boulevard was given that name after World War I.