The portion of the Route 66 Pathway Project (detail) [Image courtesy Route 66 Pathway Project /pathwayproject.org/]
The Claremont Graduate University Center for Humanities in Practice (CHIP) Route 66 Pathway Project — a richly illustrated and meticulously researched canvas scroll that stands five feet high and stretching more than 23 yards — traces the historic highway’s much-traveled route from Santa Monica’s coastline all the way to Needles at California’s eastern border.
Inspired by the National Old Trails Road map booklets that the Southern California Automobile Association produced in 1915, it
is the centerpiece of a new Pasadena Museum of History exhibition that opens Saturday, June 13 and asks visitors to slow down and read a road the rest of the country was built to speed across.
“Where History Meets the Road: Celebrating Route 66 & Colorado Boulevard” opens June 13 and runs through January 24, 2027. The Pathway Project is the kind of object the museum hopes visitors will linger over.
As Museum Executive Director Jeannette O’Malley put it, the old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words is especially true for this exhibition.
Alongside the scroll, the show features historic photographs of the people, places, and activities that defined mid-20th-century Colorado Boulevard — images the museum expects will be the highlight for many who come through.
The exhibition celebrates both the centennial of Route 66 and the 150th anniversary of Colorado Boulevard, milestones the museum is folding into its broader “Happy Birthday Pasadena” celebration of the city’s 140th birthday — a triple celebration, as the museum describes it.
The convergence is more than coincidence. Route 66 played a defining role in Pasadena’s development, transforming Colorado Boulevard into a vital corridor for cross-country travel and a gateway to the West.
What the exhibition sets out to capture is how that transformation reshaped the city’s physical and cultural landscape. As automobile travel expanded, Colorado Boulevard took on a distinctive character built around the needs of drivers: neon signage, auto-oriented businesses, and architectural styles such as Art Deco, many of which still stand today. The museum frames the boulevard as something larger than a thoroughfare — both a transportation corridor and a cultural symbol, shaped by the Route 66 themes of mobility, commerce, nostalgia, and reinvention.
Telling that story required more than a timeline. The exhibition uses interpretive text, memorabilia, and photographs together to illustrate how Colorado Boulevard shaped, and continues to shape, Pasadena’s urban landscape, economic activity, and historic preservation. The result is a portrait of a city caught between two eras: the older world of train travel and grand hotels that first brought visitors and tourism to Pasadena, and the newer wave of independent travelers who arrived by car, more cheaply and on their own schedule, in search of food, accommodations, and adventure.
That tension — between the genteel resort town and the roadside boom that followed — runs through the entire show. The amenities that sprang up to accommodate travelers along “America’s Highway” gave Colorado Boulevard a personality that residents still recognize. The exhibition’s focus on “car culture” is, in that sense, a focus on how ordinary Pasadenans lived, worked, and welcomed strangers passing through.
For visitors who want to understand how a single street can hold a century and a half of a city’s identity, the Pathway Project offers an unusually literal answer: 70 feet of it, unrolled end to end. The scroll’s mid-20th-century vantage point — the era of neon, roadside service, and cross-country adventure — is the same one the historic photographs document, so the two anchor each other. Together they let the exhibition trace not just where Route 66 went, but what it left behind in Pasadena: the mobility, the commerce, the nostalgia, and the constant reinvention that the museum identifies as the route’s enduring themes.
The exhibition is built to outlast its opening weekend. Route 66 was always about motion — getting somewhere, and getting there fast. The Pathway Project asks visitors to do the opposite: to stop, step close, and read a road whose story Pasadena has been telling for generations.
“Where History Meets the Road: Celebrating Route 66 & Colorado Boulevard” opens Saturday, June 13, 2026, and remains on view through Sunday, January 24, 2027, at the Pasadena Museum of History, 470 W. Walnut St., Pasadena, CA 91103. Exhibition galleries are open Thursday through Sunday, noon to 5:00 p.m. General admission is $9, seniors $7, and admission is free for museum members and for visitors under 18. Parking is complimentary in the museum’s lot off Walnut Street, near the corner of Orange Grove Boulevard. For more information, call (626) 577-1660 or visit pasadenahistory.org
