Completed in 1939, Los Angeles Union Station is known as the “last of the great railway stations.” It is also the last station to be built with a Fred Harvey restaurant. This menu’s cover photo is credited to Leo L. Roberg, the same Chicago photographer who took the Alvarado Hotel menu cover photo.

Click image to download a 551-KB PDF of this menu.

Curiously, the Fred Harvey restaurant isn’t visible in the cover photo, though it is visible on the right side of the photo of the station on a Union Pacific menu cover. You would think Fred Harvey would select a photo taken from an angle that emphasized its business.

Click image to download a 210-KB PDF of this postcard.

Visible or not, it was a beautiful restaurant with a rich interior design by Mary Colter that has been fully restored today, including floor tiles laid to resemble a woven Navajo rug. Hedda Hopper wrote that the adjacent cocktail lounge was “so pleasant that it’s a joy to miss your train.”

Prior to 1939, at least as far back as 1900, Fred Harvey operated the restaurant in Santa Fe’s La Grande Station, which was designed in a Moorish style that seems incongruous with the more recent fad for Spanish Mission style. LA Union Station itself is such an eclectic combination of Spanish Mission, Art Deco, and Dutch Revival styles that it would qualify as a McMansion if it were a residence.

At about the same time as Union Station opened, Santa Fe Trailways opened a bus station in Hollywood that also featured a Fred Harvey restaurant. Fred Harvey also operated restaurants in Laguna Beach, San Diego, and other cities on the California coast.