Monrovia Station
Alan Weeks Photo, Alan Weeks Collection
Pacific Electric’s Monrovia Station, located at Olive and Myrtle Avenues. The image is dated September 6, 1951.
Alan Weeks Photo
Alan Weeks Collection
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Todays LA metro website has a picture of the old Monrovia train station, which I think matches with this photo by Mr. Weeks. Do any of you experts out there care to comment? Thanks.
They’re not the same. The former Santa Fe Railway station will become MTA’s Gold Line station for Monrovia once the Foothill Extension gets built; so that one must’ve been the station seen on MTA’s website. The Pacific Electric station was located almost a mile north along Myrtle Avenue from that of the Santa Fe.
The PE Monrovia station was dismantled around 1967, years after all rail service was abandoned. I saw the timbers being loaded on trucks with Baja California license plates. Its last function was as a Christmas tree lot office. The land occupied by the station has had two or three different uses since then. One relic of the PE days that has survived is the building on the northeast corner of Myrtle and Olive; it was there when the first Red Car arrived in 1903.
As Mr. Davis observed, the timber in these old station buildings were of substantial cross-section, contemporary to the construction of the early twentieth century, exceptionally well suited for a second life south of the border. The same type license plates were observed on the vehicles that carried away the dismantled PE station in El Monte less than ten years later, after the busway and new bus station in El Monte went into service.
This corner (and the whole west side of this block) is now occupied by an apartment and commercial complex called the Paragon at Old Town. On the northwest corner of the property is a small park with plaques commemorating the P.E. and site’s status as the former home of the P.E.’s Monrovia station, as well as a metal sculpture that resembles a Big Red Car and has a different number on each end: the number of the first car to stop in Monrovia in 1903 on one end, and the number of the last car to stop in Monrovia in 1951 on the other.
My father salvaged some of the wood from the Monrovia station to build a rental apartment over our garage in Monrovia.