COLUMN ONE : Freeway Foes Refuse to Yield : Passions are fierce on both sides of the battle over extending the 710. Rivals Talmage Burke and AlvaLee Arnold have fought for decades over six miles of roadway.

For 35 years, AlvaLee Arnold has fought to keep the Long Beach Freeway out of South Pasadena.

For 41 years, Talmage V. Burke of Alhambra has fought to push it through.

That these septuagenarians have battled for so long--and that their dispute remains unresolved after nearly half a century--shows the stubborn complexities of this freeway feud, and the passions of the people on each side.

Arnold, 73, who had an ancestor die in the quixotic fight at the Alamo and whose accent still evokes southeast Texas, believes in taking no prisoners. Nonetheless, she says, “I don’t like to think of Alhambra as the enemy--just as misinformed . . . very small, narrow people.”

Burke, 75, the avuncular elder statesman of his town, tries to be more circumspect. “I’m opposed to encouraging the concept that there is some kind of war between two cities,” he says. Still, he declares that his neighbors to the north “absolutely, totally and consistently will not cooperate.”

The 710 starts in Long Beach. But instead of going north to Pasadena as planned, it ends on the Los Angeles-Alhambra border, leaving the last significant gap in Los Angeles County’s freeway system.

Construction began in 1951 and stopped in 1965, about 6.2 miles short of completion, because South Pasadena residents were furious that the proposed route would split their small suburb in half. State highway planners suggested dozens of alternative routes, trying in vain to quell the opposition.

For Alhambrans, extending the freeway would unclog streets that are jammed daily with tens of thousands of vehicles spilling onto and off the Long Beach Freeway.

But South Pasadenans say the extension would devastate the town and its broad, leafy avenues lined with gingerbread Victorians and massive Craftsman bungalows.

Although armies of preservationists, environmentalists, homeowner groups, unions and business and transportation interests have cheered on the respective sides, Alhambra and South Pasadena have fought the front-line battle. In the process, the 710 has become one of the country’s most fussed-over freeway routes.

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Arnold wrote her first anti-freeway letter to state officials after she attended a standing-room-only information meeting in 1958.

At first, she approached the fight gingerly. “We had been told, and we accepted the fact, that regional transportation needs required completion of the freeway. You have to remember the tenor of the times. We were ladies. We wore gloves and hats.”

But not anymore. By the 1970s, Arnold was verbally duking it out with highway planners and pro-freeway fighters.

Arnold, a former mayor and chairman of the city transportation commission, relishes telling war stories to her grandchildren, who go to anti-freeway rallies dressed in T-shirts that have 710 in interstate-blue numerals with a red circle and slash over them.

“There are too many people praying to save South Pasadena,” said Arnold, a retired real estate agent and mother of seven who wears her snow-white hair wrapped in a bun. “The good Lord will not let us be destroyed.”

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Alhambra City Councilman Burke, perhaps the state’s longest-serving elected municipal official, joined the fight early: when the state broke ground on the 710, shortly before he joined the council in 1952. At first, Burke thought the issue was being resolved by community leaders such as his father, then a state legislator. An Alhambra stretch of widened road--a forerunner to the freeway--was even jokingly called the Burke Freeway in honor of his father’s efforts to solve the transportation problem.

But since then, the councilman has testified from Los Angeles to Sacramento to Washington and voted for countless resolutions and appropriations as Alhambra--in the words of a past city manager--”drew a line in the sand.”

“I’ve seen everything from the beginning,” said Burke, a lawyer. He lives in the 1920s house where he lived as a child and which has been home to five generations of Burkes. The brick house, one mile east of the proposed freeway path, was once surrounded by the orange groves common to both Alhambra and South Pasadena. Now, the house is surrounded by a Southern California institution intimately tied to freeways: an auto row with 15 dealerships.

“Over the years, like Sisyphus rolling the rock uphill, we’ve gotten almost to the top of the hill and something comes along and forces us to reverse.” But now, said Burke, “the fight is pretty well over with except the shouting. I’m absolutely convinced this freeway will be built.”

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Indeed, the latest victory went to Alhambra and its allies, which include a host of other local city councils.

An advisory panel formed at the behest of federal officials has recommended an eight-lane freeway, eliminating trucks, narrowing the roadway, and adding six tunnels to lessen adverse effects on the environment and on historic structures.

So far, the scrappy South Pasadena opposition has staved off the freeway largely because it has ridden the twin waves of the environmental and historic preservation movements.

“We’ve continually torn apart every environmental impact statement they write,” said Arnold. “They can’t write an adequate one that will justify building through the center of South Pasadena.”

“I’ve already fought this freeway through four governors and now (Pete) Wilson. This freeway will never be built. We’re beyond that era.”

When Arnold talks about the town where she has lived since moving from Texas with her husband and two small children at the end of World War II, she conjures up a Norman Rockwell-like setting threatened by a wrecking ball.

Meanwhile, as Burke watches the frustrated drivers and groaning 18-wheelers roll off the 710 and jam his city’s streets, he wonders aloud how much longer the region can endure such traffic.

Details are hard to recall, but Burke says that just before South Pasadena obtained a court injunction blocking the project on environmental grounds in 1973, Alhambra and South Pasadena reached momentary agreement. “South Pasadena agreed to it for about 24 hours,” he said. “That was the only bright glimmer we’ve seen in 20 years.”

If California had a highway czar, the 710 Freeway--first proposed when the Red Car trolley still ran--would have been finished long ago. But the forces that did not want a freeway where the planners suggested it or those that did not want a highway at all have stalled the project through democratic process and courtroom maneuvers.

Both sides have spent hundreds of thousands lobbying government officials, even arranging helicopter and plane tours to show politicians the narrow strip where the extension would be built on gently rolling landscape covered mostly by single-family houses, apartments and thousands of trees.

The fight has lingered so long that the federal judge who issued the 1973 injunction died years ago.

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South Pasadena students once burned their city’s name on an Alhambra school lawn. “Of course, our people went over there and did similar things,” he said. “Little did I realize that the rivalry would come out in other ways, 50 years later, in the freeway.”

Elizabeth Merritt, associate legal counsel for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which every year since 1989 has declared South Pasadena “an endangered place,” served on the federal advisory committee that issued its report in July. “I was amazed at how vicious (the rivalry) has become,” she said.

It is a trivialization of a crucial regional issue, officials from both communities say, to present the debate solely in terms of two small suburbs fighting.

“It’s not Alhambra versus South Pasadena,” said Julio Fuentes, Alhambra’s city manager. “It’s not one-on-one basketball.”

Still, when he can, South Pasadena City Manager Kenneth Farfsing takes a lighter view. For his city, he said, the freeway debate has become a nice cottage industry producing “Save South Pasadena” tote bags, T-shirts and mugs.

But as an Alhambra homeowner for 15 years, Farfsing bemoans that his property taxes go toward financing the fight for the freeway.

Because of the towns’ proximity, other awkward situations occur. Alhambra’s public works director is married to South Pasadena’s finance director. Alhambra Councilman Boyd G. Condie has accounting offices in South Pasadena.

Condie says South Pasadena is holding the entire region’s transportation needs hostage under the guise of preservation: “They don’t want to give an inch.”

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Besides intense rivalry over the freeway, South Pasadena and Alhambra share other qualities. In the last decade, both have become the home to many immigrants, especially from China and Latin America.

With 82,000 residents, Alhambra has encouraged growth of its commercial and business districts, including Valley Boulevard with stores and restaurants that cater to the area’s growing numbers of Chinese immigrants.

Just 3.5 square miles, less than half the area of Alhambra, South Pasadena--population 24,000--has remained largely residential. Relatively upscale, it is known for good public schools and white-collar residents who enjoy preserving old houses.

Over the years, Caltrans has bought 510 houses, including some historic ones. More than 1,000 structures are directly threatened: 25 in Alhambra, 564 in the El Sereno section of Los Angeles, 143 in Pasadena and 315 in South Pasadena. Highway officials promise to save or move as many of the historic homes as possible.

Neither Arnold nor fellow freeway fighter Joanne Nuckols trusts that promise. On a visit to see Nuckols, Arnold parked in front of her comfortable 1909 Craftsman house, which is east of the proposed route. Arnold’s Dodge Van, with its vanity plate of FWY FTR, pulled next to Nuckols’ black Volvo with plates reading NO 710.

Strangely enough, the freeway supporter who perhaps riles opponents the most lives in South Pasadena--and once was its mayor.

As a South Pasadena council member and mayor in the 1960s, Lila Cox traveled the state, arguing for a “city-saving” freeway route. But Cox, 68, was ousted from office in 1970 because voters believed she wasn’t tough enough on the issue.

A lawyer, Cox heads the Long Beach Freeway Assn. and the Southern California Transportation Action Committee, coalitions of business, community and industrial interests.

Even with modifications planned to protect historic neighborhoods, the proposed road would slice very near her elegant, turn-of-the-century house. “It’s criminal to take a neighborhood like this,” Cox said, sitting in her back-yard gazebo. But the freeway of today, she said, would not be the “horrible monster” proposed years ago. It would be low-scale, below-grade and partially covered. “My position is they should get on with it.”

As Cox can testify, the South Pasadena majority these days opposes the freeway. But once all was not so harmonious. In the 1960s and 1970s, she said, there was much divisiveness and “a real period of viciousness. Children weren’t invited to parties because of their parents’ stand on the freeway.”

Some people who didn’t agree with her support of the freeway, she said, would cross the street rather than pass close by.

South Pasadena has long known this kind of passion. In some ways, it is new to Alhambra, dating back only 10 years or so.

Alhambra’s public relations man is Nat Read, who was hired last year to frame the fight in terms of a crucial regional transportation issue. He said freeways, like dams or prisons, are much easier to rally a group to fight against than for. The pro-freeway forces, he said, encouraged the state when it undertook its environmental studies, including eight major ones. But, he said: “There was a sense of patience and fairness in the early years that is now regretted.”

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Fourteen years after work on the 710 began, the freeway stopped at the San Bernardino Freeway in 1965. Back then, the estimated cost to extend the 710 to the Foothill Freeway was $80 million. Today, it has ballooned to $709 million.

The stage seems set for a climactic battle--the Long Beach Freeway Armageddon. Maybe.

Last year, Gov. Wilson directed his Administration to take “all necessary steps” to complete the project. Federal highway officials, who for years had been reluctant to push the project, approved the environmental study on it.

State highway officials are awaiting a response from the Clinton Administration to the federal advisory panel’s recommendations, and they said they expect a favorable ruling by the fall.

South Pasadena’s “freeway attorney,” Antonio Rossmann, a Harvard-trained environmental lawyer whose office is in San Francisco, says he hopes to exploit that environmental ground.

Jerry B. Baxter, the state official in charge of the freeways in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, has no less of a resolve.

Baxter, 58, started with Caltrans the year after Arnold wrote her first letter. On his office wall are the pictures of the eight Los Angeles regional directors of the state Department of Transportation who have faced the freeway issue since the late 1940s. Half have died.

The choice to go through South Pasadena, Baxter said, was agonizing for everyone, including Gov. Wilson. Baxter, who lives in the small suburb of La Canada Flintridge, said he knows what it is like to live in a community torn over a freeway. When the Foothill Freeway was proposed to go through his town in the early 1970s, residents made the same arguments voiced in the 710 debate. The road came through, he said, “and we survived.”

The time to pour cement has arrived, said Baxter, a rough-and-ready guy who looks as if he could pour it himself. “Enough is enough,” he said. “There are just so many ways you can connect two points that are six miles apart.”

Times community correspondent Richard Winton contributed to this story.

Short Road, Long Fight

Here are some highlights in the long-running saga of the proposed extension of the Long Beach Freeway: * 1933: State highway envisioned, to run from Long Beach to Monterey Park. * 1949: Gov. Earl Warren signs legislation extending route into South Pasadena. * 1950s: Construction begins at Long Beach and state Legislature extends proposed path to Pasadena. * 1960: State begins studies of potential routes. * 1964: Thousands of people attend hearings at which seven routes are discussed. The California Highway Commission adopts Meridian Route, which parallels South Pasadena’s Meridian Avenue. * 1965: Long Beach Freeway reaches southern San Gabriel Valley at the San Bernardino Freeway. * 1972: By a 2-1 ratio, South Pasadena voters prohibit the City Council from closing off any streets that would permit construction of the Meridian Route. * 1977: State releases final environmental impact statement and recommends scaled-down project: a four-lane freeway connecting the Pasadena Freeway and the Foothill Freeway. Federal highway officials balk. All work on the project is stopped. * 1982: State legislation authorizes Caltrans to build the freeway without consent of municipal governments. * 1983: Federal council on preservation suggests alternate routes to avoid destruction of historic properties. * 1984: Final environmental impact statement again recommends Meridian Route. California Transportation Commission accepts it. Transportation planners reject federal historic preservation group’s suggestions. * 1987: Caltrans holds hearing on third draft environmental impact statement that outlines a new route, the Meridian Variation, developed in response to calls for saving historic sites. * 1989: The National Trust for Historic Preservation announces that South Pasadena, because of the freeway threat, is on a list of America’s 11 “endangered places.” * 1992: Gov. Pete Wilson’s Administration directs state transportation officials to build the freeway. Federal highway officials formally approve the environmental study. * 1993: Advisory panel formed at the behest of federal highway officials recommends eliminating trucks, narrowing the roadway and building six tunnels to lessen environmental impacts.

SOURCES: California Department of Transportation, South Pasadena, Alhambra, court filings and Times files.