The New Banners on Foothill Boulevard Aren't Tourist Bait. They're a Timeline.

Drive Foothill Boulevard through La Verne this month and you'll pass banners you didn't see a year ago. A vintage truck rounding a curve. A cracked bell rendered in old postage-stamp style. An orange blossom tucked into the corner of a design that otherwise reads like classic Route 66 iconography. If you assumed these were generic centennial decor, dropped in because 2026 happens to be a big anniversary year for the Mother Road, you'd be forgiven. Most towns along Route 66 are doing some version of the same thing right now.

La Verne isn't, and the city said so itself. In the notes accompanying its own banner program, one line does the real work: "Most communities mark a national anniversary with borrowed symbols. La Verne has its own." That's not marketing copy. It's the actual thesis behind why the banners look the way they do, and it's worth understanding before you drive past them again without noticing.

The bell in the design is a real bell, not a stock illustration

The banner with the cracked bell isn't referencing Philadelphia in the abstract. La Verne owns a Liberty Bell replica, one of only two ever awarded to California cities to mark the nation's Bicentennial in 1976. The city didn't buy it. Residents did, including schoolchildren, through a nickel-and-dime fundraising campaign the city called "Own a Piece of Liberty." That bell still sits in La Verne today, and the banner program leaned on it directly, framing this year's America 250 push as a continuation of something the community already built once before, not a new civic performance staged for the occasion.

The Route 66 side of the program does something similar with a different local fact. One selected design shows a vintage truck rounding the curve at Foothill Boulevard and D Street, the 2100 block, with the San Gabriel Mountains behind it and an orange blossom worked into the border. The city describes that flower as a direct nod to the citrus economy that built the town. Before Foothill Boulevard carried 30,000 cars a day, it carried orange trucks. La Verne grew citrus long enough to earn the nickname "Heart of the Orange Empire," and the groves didn't disappear until the early 1970s, when postwar development finally caught up with them. The banner isn't decorating that history. It's citing it.

What actually happened along this street over the summer

If you missed the civic part of this, you missed a fairly specific window. The city launched a free Route 66 Passport Program on Monday, June 15, a scavenger hunt built around 16 participating businesses along the boulevard, each hiding a small Route 66 icon somewhere visible inside. Passport booklets were available at La Verne City Hall on D Street and at the La Verne Library next door. Collect ten stamps and you were entered into a raffle for prizes the businesses themselves donated. Collect all 16 and your name went in twice.

The deadline to turn in a completed passport was August 3. That date has passed, which means if you're reading this in September wondering whether you can still pick one up, you technically can't complete the original raffle round. What's still true: the banners the passport program was paired with are staying up through the rest of the year as part of the broader commemoration, and the city's Route 66 & America 250 page continues to post material from the parallel piece of this program, a student essay contest built around a single prompt: describe what a visitor would learn about America from your own neighborhood. The winning entries are still up on the city's site, and reading a few of them tells you something the banners can't. One student's answer started with birds and trees and neighbors picking up trash. Another led with the park and people watering their lawns. Nobody's twelve-year-old wrote about Route 66 nostalgia. They wrote about the actual street they live on.

The whole program traces back to a single City Council meeting on March 2, when the council directed staff to start building community programming around both milestones landing in the same year: Route 66 turning 100 and the country turning 250. Two anniversaries, one corridor, and a city that decided to answer with its own artifacts instead of licensing someone else's.

The road underneath the story is bigger than the nostalgia suggests

It helps to know what Foothill Boulevard actually is before you decide the banners are quaint. This isn't a two-lane heritage strip kept alive for photo ops. According to the city's own economic profile of the corridor, Foothill Boulevard carries 1.4 million square feet of contiguous retail space across 175 acres, generated roughly $232 million in sales in 2024, and moves more than 30,000 cars a day, fed directly by the 210 Freeway. For comparison, the city places that retail footprint alongside Rancho Cucamonga's Victoria Gardens, which covers a similar 1.4 million square feet on a tighter 147 acres. Foothill Boulevard isn't preserved in amber. It's an active regional retail corridor that happens to have never let go of the road it was built on.

That road has a real starting point, too. Foothill Boulevard becomes California State Route 66 the moment it crosses the interchange with SR-210 in La Verne, which is the western terminus of the entire state designation before it runs southeast through Pomona and Claremont on its way toward San Bernardino. The alignment itself predates the 1926 numbering. It started as a route laid out by the National Old Trails Highway effort around 1915, following the Santa Fe rail line, and got absorbed into the brand new U.S. Highway 66 designation in 1926. When the 210 Freeway went in decades later, engineers had to bend the previously straight boulevard into the S-curve it still holds today just north of the underpass.

A short list of what's actually along that stretch, if you want a reason to look twice next time you're driving it:

• Mr. D's Diner at 919 Foothill Boulevard, a stainless steel building built in a deliberately retro style, sitting almost directly at that S-curve
• The site where La Paloma Restaurant opened in 1966, built over the footprint of a 1920s sandwich shop that predates the freeway entirely
• The D Street intersection itself, the 2100 block, which is the exact location the city chose to depict on its Route 66 centennial banner rather than a generic stretch of road

None of this is marked with a plaque telling you to stop and look. It's just there, doing what it's always done, which is carry traffic past a history most people driving through it never clock.

Why this is worth knowing if you already live here

The easy version of this story is "Route 66 turns 100, towns along the route are celebrating." That version is true and also says nothing specific about La Verne. The actual story is that a city with a real, publicly funded Liberty Bell and a real citrus economy chose to spend its centennial budget saying so, instead of putting up the same neon-diner-and-tailfin imagery you'd see in Illinois or Arizona or anywhere else along the 2,400 miles this road covers. The passport program is closed for the season. The essay contest has already been judged. But the banners are still up on Foothill Boulevard right now, and once you know what they're actually referencing, they stop being decoration and start reading like a timeline someone bothered to get right.

If you're the kind of person who likes knowing what's actually behind the things you drive past every day, that curiosity tends to extend to the neighborhood itself, not just its street furniture. For a closer look at what makes this stretch of La Verne worth paying attention to beyond the banners, our La Verne neighborhood guide covers the corridor in more depth, and our recent piece on what keeps La Verne's free summer programming running digs into some of the same civic machinery that put this centennial program together in the first place.

If a corridor doing $232 million a year in retail sales while still tending its own centennial banners tells you something about the health of this pocket of La Verne, you're reading it right. Maureen Haney has spent two decades paying attention to the details on streets like this one. Request a personalized market consultation anytime you want a local read on what's actually happening around you.