California sun and in general being antithetical to the ethos of Los Angeles. Two questions were put to vote in 1926. First, the voters approved Union Station instead of elevated railways by 61.3 to 38.7 percent margin. Second, the electorate voted in favor of Los Angeles Plaza, not Chinatown, as the site of the new station, but by a much smaller 51.1 to 48.9 percent margin. However, largely due to the efforts of preservationist Christine Sterling and Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler, Union Station would not replace the Plaza, but be built across the street in Chinatown, which was demolished for the project. During the construction process of Union Station, archaeological remains from the Tongva village of Yaanga were uncovered. Researcher Joan Brown summarized this in 1992:Previous archaeological studies conducted at and near Union Station indicate that buried intact prehistoric and historic deposits exist in-situ beneath and in the vicinity of Union Station. The extent of the archaeological deposits is unknown at this time. Union Station was constructed on three to twenty feet of fill dirt placed over the original Los Angeles Chinatown. Chinatown, in turn, had been built over the remains of an Indian village, tentatively identified as the village of Yangna. The glamorous new $11 million station (in 1939 dollars) took over from La Grande Station which had suffered major damage in the 1933 Long Beach earthquake and Central Station, which had itself replaced the Arcade Depot in 1914. Passenger service was provided by the Santa Fe, Southern Pacific, and Union Pacific, as well as local lines of the Pacific Electric Railway and Los Angeles Railway (LARy). The famed Super Chief luxury train carried Hollywood stars and others to Chicago and thence the East Coast. Union Station saw heavy use during World War II, but later saw declining patronage due to the growing popularity of air travel and automobiles. In 1948, the Santa Fe's Super Chief lost its brakes coming into the station, smashed through a steel bumper and concrete wall, and stopped with one third of the front of the locomotive dangling over Aliso St. No one was killed or injured, but the engineer lost his job. The station was designated as a Los Angeles Historic–Cultural Monument No. 101 on August 2, 1972, and placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. The first commuter rail service to Union Station was the short-lived CalTrain