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Community Corner

A Future Gold Line Station: Once an Elegant Stop on the Santa Fe Line

Built in 1925, the Santa Fe Station connected Monrovia with the rest of the San Gabriel Valley, and may receive a new lease on life with the construction of the Gold Line Foothill Extension.

As our own Stephen McCarthy , the old Monrovia train station, or Santa Fe Station, as it was known in years past, may be one of several destinations for a phantom "ghost train" heard passing the night.

The station itself certainly is a spooky place—and, after all, it is near a cemetery. Now sequestered behind a chain-link fence in a nondescript parking lot at the corner of Myrtle Avenue and Duarte Road, the building has clearly been the victim of neglect, not to mention occasional vandalism.

Built in 1925--the same year as Pasadena's own recently renovated Santa Fe Depot--it used to be one of a half dozen or so modest but elegant stations between Pasadena and the farther-flung reaches of the San Gabriel Valley on the Santa Fe line. But it has been closed since the early 1970s, and fenced off for the past 20 years.

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Replacing an earlier wooden depot built in 1886, the station was a midpoint on a connecting line that ran between Los Angeles and San Bernardino. Of the more unique features of the original station was the Myrtle Avenue Railroad, a one mile mule-drawn railway that ran from the station north up Myrtle to the business district. On the way up, the mules pulled the single passenger car, while on the way back down, the animals were loaded onto a platform and the car used natural momentum and a brake system to propel itself down the street.

Though the mule-drawn system had gone at the time, shortly after it opened, the Santa Fe Station began serving a new demographic—actors from Los Angeles. In 1927, Victor Adamson Productions opened a short-lived movie studio directly across from the station, making it "the first motion-picture studio to be built on a transcontinental railroad line," according to the Los Angeles Times. This distinction apparently had little influence over the studio's success, and much like Monrovia's earlier , the business soon went under partly due to legal troubles, producing only two films while in town.

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Mail cars as well as passenger trains made regular stops at the station and the nearby Santa Fe Middle School was named after the rail line. Monrovia was also served by the Pacific Electric line until 1951.

If current plans for the Foothill Gold Line Extension proceed, the station will be renovated and its original features will be preserved as part of the "Station Square Transit Village. Early artists' renderings show a revamped station surrounded by retail and office space.

Much like Pasadena's Santa Fe station, the coming of the Gold Line is probably the most pragmatic solution for saving a crumbling, though historically significant building. Plans for renovating the Monrovia depot were discussed as far back as 1990, but for a variety of reasons, were never put into action.

The new Gold Line station is set to open in 2014.

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