Pasadena’s 710 Freeway oral history project moves forward, honoring stories of displaced families

The oral component of Pasadena’s 710 freeway historical project is transitioning from its outreach phase to a new stage after months of work by project leaders.

“Our ultimate plan is to have an actual documentary, a film where we brought in a filmmaker,” CEO of Allegra Consulting Inc. Suzanne Madison said in a recent interview. “But we’re creating footage as we go. We have different events. We’re doing outreach. So we’re capturing footage and we’ll have to figure out in a very artful way, how to blend the old with the new.”

To reach a wider and diverse audience, Allegra, together with the city, launched a survey in April, seeking feedback, photos and stories of those displaced by the defunct freeway extension nearly six decades ago. The online survey, available in English, Spanish and Japanese, opened for submissions on April 29, and will close this Sunday, June 30.

Once the outreach portion ends, project leaders will bring in a historian to study all the information gathered during the outreach “to make sure that we’re engaged with the right people who were displaced,” Madison said. After narrowing down the responses, the team will conduct interviews with selected individuals for the documentary.

One of the first families interviewed by Allegra was that of Barbara Richardson King. Their conversation took place on Friday, May 31, at King’s cozy residence in Pasadena. Surrounded by her daughters, cousins and niece, King recounted the struggle their ancestors overcame to bring them to where they are today.

The family are descendants of the Grants, five brothers originally from Parkersburg, West Virginia, who journeyed to California starting in the late 1890s in search of new beginnings.

One of the brothers, Earl Grant, became a prominent African-American figure in the city and founded Family Savings and Loan Association, one of the largest Black-owned savings and loans firms in the nation at the time, with locations in Pasadena and Los Angeles.

By the 1930s, the close-knit Grant family had settled in Pasadena, primarily on Vernon Street in the city’s northwestern part.

“We had a wonderful neighborhood where we walked to conveniences; we walked to churches; we walked to stores. We felt safe and we knew each other,” she said.

But despite their achievements, the brothers “suffered a lot of setbacks,” the most devastating being the 710 freeway displacement, said King, who heard about the oral project that the city is putting together through her church.

“After the 710 came, I can remember my grandfather. He had to go back and he sat there in his car and cried like a baby when they tore his house down,” she said. “But even with all of that, I’m so proud of my family, of what we’ve accomplished, and what we’ve overcome, and how we took lemons and made lemonade.”

The Grant family’s story is just one of many illustrating the profound impact of the 710 freeway project.

Last year, Allegra Consulting became one of several groups contracted by the city to document the historical impacts of the failed 710 freeway extension.

In the 1960s, Caltrans used eminent domain to purchase nearly 60 acres of land in Northwest Pasadena for the planned freeway expansion. Hundreds of homes in the area, primarily from low-income and minority communities, were displaced in the process.

After the state relinquished the “stub” back to Pasadena in 2022, the city began efforts to reimagine the site. Part of this effort involves compiling a historical documentation of the defunct 710 freeway and its impacts on people, which city leaders have said is a crucial aspect of their work.

“It’s part of an overall picture and capturing the history of the site,” said Danny Parker, chair of Pasadena’s Reconnecting Communities 710 Advisory Group, a 16-member community working group tasked with shaping the future of the relinquished land. “I think it’s important from the perspective broadly that Pasadena is a city that revels in its history and embedded in Pasadena’s cultural DNA is that respect for history and tradition.”

Parker said the oral history component “provides a qualitative complement to the more quantitative or somewhat objective data.”

Three historians were hired for this phase of the project. Besides Allegra, the city contracted with Architectural Resources Group to gather historical data on the freeway’s impacts, and Regents of the University of California (UCLA) to analyze how the construction, along with city policies and practices at the time, contributed to segregation and shaped Pasadena’s current racial landscape.

“I think when we’re talking about people, it’s the tone and texture of understanding, for example, for someone displaced by the freeway in this specific context. It’s not enough to just know where people wound up, but it’s also important to know these oral histories that reflect why they wound up where and what was life like for them? How did their lives change after being displaced by the freeway? What were their lives like before the freeway came in?”

In a way, that’s what some of the Grant family members decided to participate in this project.

“It’s important for me to be here today and the rest of my family to be here today because our ancestors can’t speak for themselves,” said Alison Moses, King’s niece. “So we have to be their mouthpieces and let everyone know that even though our homes were taken by eminent domain, we did not get fair market value, we were not treated fairly.”

Robert Grant III said he believes the project “heals some of the longstanding wounds” in the city.

“Our family is the fabric of Pasadena,” he said. “We were here in the segregated Pasadena, and now we’re here in the integrated Pasadena. And so for those of us that have seen the transition from one to the next, it helps generations that may have not done the right thing before, understand that we’re better. And for those of us that actually went through the transition, we can have a deeper affection for it,” he said.

“We won’t repeat history, but more importantly, we’re healing Pasadena by telling the story, and that’s a good thing,” Grant added. “A little bit of healing is what we’re trying to do.”