State of the Union Station

LAVoice fills us in on the sudden move by Union Station owner Catellus Development to erect huge new buildings in front of the classy 1939 train station.

Notes the website: For several weeks now, the front parking areas of the station (obscured from Alameda by high hedges) showed the occasional glimpse of heavy equipment. Most people just assumed the parking lots were being repaved or perhaps that an underground garage was in the making.

So it came as quite a jolt to make my twice weekly pass-by the Station before jumping on the 101 onramp on Alameda to see that the south lot had sprouted a three-story (so far) matrix of steel girders! Goodbye, unobstructed view, approaching from the south.

The Downtown News published a story a couple days ago to the effect that the next shocker would be in the north lot, on the southeast corner of Alameda and Cesar Chavez.

A few hundred lucky yuppies with bucks to burn on trendy living spaces and a few more in a just as trendy office building (that's the best scuttlebutt so far) will have exclusive views of Union Station that used to belong to all of us.

Truly, truly horrifying. I'm all for downtown development, as regular readers of this site know. I'm truly excited to hear about the proposal to build a $125 million mixed-use development in place of the block-long parking lot at Fourth and Main streets in Downtown's Old Bank District. The two new buildings will combine retail space with apartments, hopefully moving the area one step closer to vibrancy.

But Union Station, where Maria and I got married, is a different story. It's one of L.A.'s true grand landmarks. To block that view is a travesty.