By Terry Miller
Over the past year, the City of Monrovia has been working to carefully repair the historic Santa Fe Depot, which is planned to be utilized as a café / restaurant once it is fully restored. Community Development and Public Services staff have been coordinating construction activities at the site. The major structural work is complete, and crews are now working to finish the installation of the windows, rain gutters, and completing minor touch ups. At that point, the site will be ready for the operator to come in to complete the interior tenant improvements.
The depot reuses the former Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway depot, built 1926 in a Spanish colonial-revival style. The 1926 station replaced a wooden depot built on the site in 1886 by the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Valley Railroad used until 1972. Installed in 1887, a mule-drawn railway, a single passenger car, called the Myrtle Avenue Railroad at that time ran from the Monrovia station up Myrtle Ave to downtown Monrovia. On the way back down to the rail station, the mule was loaded onto a flatcar and downhill gravity took the cars back to the station. By the early 1920s the mule-streetcar system was removed. In 1906 the Pacific Electric rail car arrived in Monrovia.
In 2018 Station Square will be a hub of new business activity with a new massive mixed use apartment complex adjacent to the Gold Line, a trend in all Gold Line cities.
