I don’t doubt that as part of the ongoing current saga that is the cities of the San Gabriel Valley getting, as the church ladies so aptly say, right with God about their hideous longtime support of the 710 Freeway extension that happily never happened, the $200,000 the Pasadena City Council allocated this week to compile a history of the dismal failure will be more or less well-spent.

From 1965 on, about 1,500 buildings and homes were demolished north from the El Sereno neighborhood of Los Angeles into South Pasadena and Pasadena, and some 4,000 people were displaced from their residences.

Plenty of local cities fully bought into the Caltrans nonsense about the need for the freeway, but the great irony has always been that its most adamant local proselytizer, Alhambra, didn’t lose any housing or neighborhoods at all.

And the very fact that Pasadena City Hall, unlike all the rest of the area cities, actually built what we now know as the 710 stub, a mini-freeway that goes two absurd off-ramps — Del Mar and California — south from the 210 is a reminder of what many people have conveniently forgotten: For decades, the majority of the Pasadena City Council, now so proudly and valiantly anti-710, so house-proud for being so, was, next to the denizens of Alhambra City Hall, the greatest supporter of the stupid idea.

It was redevelopment time around the halls of power in the Crown City, especially in the early 1970s, when what we now know as Old Pasadena was very nearly demolished to build corporate headquarters like the former Parsons tower on the west and the former Pacific Bell building on its east.

The men of the powerful Pasadena Redevelopment Agency and a private group of business burghers called, yes, Pasadena Now were behind the campaign to raze everything historical in sight and start over in order to become … what, downtown Glendale redux? Something like that. And the planned freeway extension providing yet another link to Los Angeles — one that, unlike the swell and sedate Pasadena Freeway, allowed truck traffic — very much fit into their plans.

I won’t say very much for my own political prognostications over the years except that I have been anti-710 extension since I was a teenager, and so I suppose it’s gratifying to have the entire world coming around to one’s own point of view. Well, not one’s own. I mean, I did turn the official opinion stance of this newspaper slowly around — like turning the Queen Mary — from one of “it’s good for business” support for the extension to one of preservationist, environmentalist opposition to it when I became editorial page editor in 1987. So that was something.

But the heavy lifting all along was done by little South Pasadena City Hall and by that city’s amazing citizen volunteers such as the great Joanne Nuckols, she of the Volvo station wagon with the No 710 license plate. Along with their allies to the north in Pasadena Heritage, led by Claire Bogaard and Sue Mossman, along with attorney Chris Sutton, it’s plucky South Pas that finally beat the stupid, neighborhood-destroying, city-splitting, diesel exhaust-belching truck route into submission, at a cost for literally decades of ignoring almost every other issue in their town, very much including the state of repair of its own streets and sidewalks.

Anyway, now that this Pasadena-commissioned report will come out, we’ll at some point have a tidy place in which to read all about the racial and class indignities that were wrought when the bulldozers took down the West Pasadena neighborhood to create what the Tournament of Roses calls The Pit — a staging place for Rose Parade entrants — and what the kids at Sequoyah School to its immediate south call Lake Sequoyah, because it fills up into an almost water-skiable pond after heavy rains.

My teenage opposition began when family friend Marian Schuster bought a sweet little half-timbered cottage on State Street after a divorce. As with Julia Child’s brown-shingled Craftsman childhood home, as with dozens of other examples of wonderful architecture in the neighborhood, soon enough Caltrans stole half her yard when it widened Pasadena Avenue, along with the parallel St. John, into what is essentially a substitute freeway. Look at it today on Google Maps, which literally calls the surface street the 710. And be glad that every once in a while the good people win.

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com.