The Foothill Extension, a section of light rail line bogged down in a bureaucratic morass for over six years, had finally gotten the go ahead. It had taken a lot of work and a lot of patience. The Foothill Extension Authority, mayors, communities up and down the foothills, and their allies had put in countless hours to make this dream a reality. Finally, the long-neglected San Gabriel Valley was about to get some relief from hours of infuriating, congestion-clogged freeways. Our agency had played a small role in those battles for relief, and had helped people in the valley make their voices heard.
Now Pasadena Advertising Marketing and Design had been chosen to make the long-awaited news public with a series of six billboards. We backed the boards up with souvenir packets of postcards featuring the artwork for each station’s billboards.
We designed one board for each of the six new locations along the route featuring architectural renderings of the site. The first to get it’s own board was the Monrovia station.
When I got to the site, the board sat all alone at the south end of a sprawling, virtually empty parking lot. The day before, the lot had been packed with people and politicians, reporters and dignitaries. Some were there to celebrate the prospect of relief from years of unyielding, bumper-to-bumper rush hours. Others were there to finally claim their role in a hard fought victory over substantial odds. Some were there to weasel out a little credit for which they had no right whatsoever. But, that’s politics.
I liked visiting the empty lot a whole lot better.
Off to the south east side of the lot, I saw the long forgotten Monrovia rail station that I had first seen over a decade ago, as it was being closed down and boarded up. Now it would have a second chance at life as a part of the new Monrovia Gold Line station complex. That made this one little victory all that much sweeter.
I can’t wait to see it restored, and I’m sure there are more than a few long-time Monrovia residents who will rejoice to see it come back into use again.
Every once in a while, advertising benefits people and whole communities. This is one of those times. We in Pasadena only played a small role in this battle, but once we had been invited to join in the fight, we hung on for the whole ride.
I couldn’t be prouder of the end result.
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This is the first of two entries in my blog about a month that has been both exhausting and exhilarating. Being a part of the advertising effort in the Foothill Extension fight allowed our agency to make a lasting impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of San Gabriel Valley residents. Advertisers are rarely offered that kind of chance, but after six years of wrangling, we have finally gotten a glimpse of a future we helped create.
Advertising is widely perceived as fun, and much of the time it is. And challenging, which it also is. And frustrating, which it is more often than any of us would care to admit. Yet very rarely, it can be deeply meaningful and rewarding. In the last few weeks, we have been lucky enough to have two such moments. This was only the first.
