Mary Colter’s Restaurant at L.A. Union Station

Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) was responsible for the interior design of the Fred Harvey restaurant and cocktail lounge in Los Angeles’s Union Station. The station opened in May 1939 when the era of passenger rail travel was already winding down.

The new station was commissioned in 1933 to consolidate the terminals of three railways. Consulting architects John and Donald B. Parkinson, a father and son team, developed the design of the station before handing it off to the architects from the three railroads to complete. The design was a blend of Mission, Spanish Colonial Revival, Art Deco, and Streamline Moderne.

Original restaurant. (Security Pacific National Bank Photo Collection/ Los Angeles Public Library)

It was not until December 1938 that the railways’ Architects Subcommittee involved Fred Harvey, Mary E.  J. Colter’s employer. Fred Harvey had been granted the concession for the station’s restaurant. The committee estimated this would leave six months for planning and executing the designs of the restaurant and kitchen, although the station would open less than five months later.

Fred Harvey submitted sketches for the Architects Subcommittee to review on January 20, 1939, and a week later Colter attended their meeting.  By mid-February, the committee received final ceiling and wall plans. Colter’s design for the restaurant and cocktail lounge fused her Southwestern style with art deco.

Fred Harvey post card (The Newberry Library)

The flooring pattern in the unrestored restaurant, 2014 (Visitor7, CC BY-SA 3.0)

The pattern of the Valencia Spanish cement tiles resembles a pattern that might be found on a Navajo rug, and the cocktail lounge was equipped with seventeen curved booths. The walls and ceiling were covered with an acoustical treatment. “So pleasant there it’s a joy to miss your train,” a local columnist wrote of the cocktail lounge, “No one wants to catch one.” The design fostered efficient operations as well as a pleasant atmosphere. Fred Harvey’s restaurant served as many as 800 diners per hour, most of them soldiers, during World War II.

In a career that included designing interiors for the Fred Harvey shops and restaurants at union stations in Kansas City, Chicago, and St. Louis, this would be Colter’s last station restaurant. Owing to the decline in rail passenger travel, the Los Angeles Union Station restaurant closed in 1967, its interiors intact. The station was listed on the National Register for Historic Places in 1980. In 2016, the restaurant’s mezzanine was restored, and in 2018 a brew pub opened in the former location of the Fred Harvey restaurant.

Now more than 100,000 people pass through Los Angeles Union Station each week day; it serves as a hub for commuter, light rail, subway, and Amtrak trains. No doubt Colter’s design tempts some of them to stop by the restaurant.

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Sources:

Los Angeles Union Station Collection, Regional History Collection #330, Special Collections, University of Southern California.

Architectural Resources Group, exhibit boards, “Fred Harvey Restaurant Mezzanine Restoration,” Los Angeles Union Station (accessed July 10, 2019).

“Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, May 17, 1939, 12.

“Los Angeles Union Station History, ‘The Last of the Great Train Stations,’” n.d.

Irving S. Fritzen, “Streamlining a Pueblo: Los Angeles Opens a New Union Station,” The Santa Fe Magazine, June 1939, 7 - 14.