Last week, we celebrated something of a milestone: Monrovia Patch had its first birthday.
The site sprouted up from the ground on Oct. 18, 2010----and has since strived to be a portal for everything the city has to offer. It is now one of more than 850 Patch sites in towns like ours around America.
Monrovia Patch is not just a news site, it's a place to connect. It's a place to find and post events and announcements, to blog about what's important to you, and to check out the rest of Monrovia-related content on the web. It's our best attempt to digitize the city.
To celebrate our birthday, we thought we'd take a look back at some of our favorite stories over the last year. Many of these stories were the direct result of tips from readers like you. So a sincere thanks to everyone who comes back to this site for everything local on a daily basis, to everyone who comments, to everyone who gets involved with what's happening in this city. And thank you to our terrific columnists, bloggers and freelancers who provide a depth of coverage that's available nowhere else.
Without further ado, the highlights:
- Our first story that created quite a stir and got picked up by news outlets all around Los Angeles was the school district's at .
- Another story that raised the ire of some locals and one councilman was the , at considerable expense, while Monrovia was in the midst of budget cuts.
- A local company created a robot hummingbird that flies just like the real thing, and we shot . Aerovironment was recently honored by Popular Mechanics magazine for the invention.
- Monrovia has been at the center of the effort to extend the Gold Line past Pasadena, and we've broken every major story along the way, reached between the city and GLCA to bring a maintenance yard to town. We've also stayed on top of the .
- We also broke every development in the .
- Columnist Jim Wigton, the president of the Monrovia Old House Preservation Group, has taken us through the rich history of the city each week, like in .
- Columnist Jaime Townzen wrote about the lighter side of motherhood, and told .
- In one of our "Dispatches" special reports, we told the story of a pottery in business for decades in Monrovia that was .
- On a weekly basis, we've profiled the prominent residents in town who have made a difference, such as .
Thanks again Monrovia. We hope to keep hearing from you.
