This took place in Pasadena, in one of the houses originally slated for freeway demolition. In 2018, Before Present organized an archival exhibition of materials related to the 710 and the extension dispute. This collection of documents, spaces, and memories linger in what Norman Klein would call the subjunctive tense: the site of a freeway never built, but entered into the record of history nonetheless. There is also the significant architectural and spatial artifact of more than five hundred properties still under the management of the state transit authority that were purchased by eminent domain decades ago, slated for demolition to build the freeway that never came to pass. And yet, traces of this project remain legible in a vast archive of news articles, photographs, maps, drawings, and ephemera. The 710 extension will be the last section of that sprawling modernist vision not to be built. Today, after nearly sixty years of resistance from homeowners, tenants, NGOs, property lawyers, local and state politicians, the un-built 710 extension has become known as one of the longest-running transportation land use disputes in American history.Ī number of the original routes in Los Angeles County’s post-war Master Plan of Freeways and Expressways have never been built. Despite widespread opposition and local speculation about where and if such an extension should be built, the official route – called the Meridian Alignment – was announced in 1964. In 1960, the California Department of Public Works, Division of Highways officially informed the cities of El Sereno, Alhambra, South Pasadena, and Pasadena that studies were underway to determine a route to extend the Long Beach Freeway (710) through their cities to connect with the Foothill Freeway (210), a major east-west corridor of the Inland Empire.
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