To accurately restore the old Monrovia Depot, architects viewed archival photos showing the arrival of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the city in 1939.

But the images always showed crowds of well-wishers who jammed the platform and obscured the artistic elements of the Santa Fe train station. To make matters worse, no photos exist of the south side facing the tracks, nor of the interior.

Their best look at a functioning depot built in 1926 came from an unlikely source: “The Trouble with Angels,” a 1966 comedy starring Hayley Mills and Rosalind Russell, in which the station was used in several scenes. From the movie, they could study the depot’s oblong windows with their unique ironwork, it’s giant front door dotted with window squares and the geometric carvings on cast stone columns.

The restoration of Monrovia’s most iconic building, which had been decaying for 45 years at the corner of Duarte Road and Myrtle Avenue, had cleared perhaps its final hurdle. The station is just a few weeks away from completion after months of delays caused by the initial lack of information on exactly how to remake the missing doors and windows.

“This is special. It is really iconic. Something that will have a lasting legacy,” said Nic Fetter, director of marketing for Samuelson & Fetter, the Monrovia-based developer that landed the contract from the city of Monrovia for the $2.2 million project.

The company had been a part of Monrovia’s redevelopment renaissance in the 1970s and 1980s, but it had never done restoration this sensitive. So it called in Spectra Co., a builder specializing in restoring and re-purposing old structures, and Undisclosable, a Los Angeles architectural firm led by Alejandra Lillo and Bryan Flaig, to work out the details.

“This is a building impressed on people’s consciousness,” said Steve Baker, a Monrovia historian. “The depot looked awful for so long. Now it is a symbol of Monrovia’s rebirth.”

Baker said Fetter and its subcontractors are going the extra mile to recreate the original William H. Mohr building. The only others designed by Mohr in the Spanish Colonial style standing today in the San Gabriel Valley are the Claremont Depot, in operation as a Metrolink station, and the Azusa station near the downtown Gold Line stop.

“This group was replicating it on sight by creating their own molds and painstakingly matching the color of the cast stone, like the colonnades on the south face. They went to the ‘nth’ degree of restoration,” Baker said.

Fetter walked through the station on Monday, noting the careful work at each corner of the 2,500-square foot building.

The columns were split in two, reinforced with wood and closed up using molds that matched the original shape and color, he said. The stucco walls were gently scraped followed by an acid wash, two coats of primer and two coats of paint, Fetter explained. “We wanted to preserve the original stucco exterior.”

On the south wall, the iron work was returned from safe storage, restored, and now surround an upstairs balcony as they did in the original design. The red roof tiles, placed in storage by city workers soon after the building was abandoned in 1972, were cleaned and reused on the roof affixed by mortar and some replicated tiles surrounded by copper flashing.

On the east wall, the black Santa Fe logo casts a shadow on the stucco walls. The restored steel letters pushed out from the wall spell out M-O-N-R-O-V-I-A.

Inside the main room — what will be a restaurant dining room — the ceiling is adorned with chestnut brown beams that were restored and replaced. A copper frame matching the original stone relief will surround one of the oblong windows. Under a floorboard remains a lever system that was once used to switch the tracks by hand.

Going a slightly different way, the designers added a modern, 2,200-feet cantilever-covered patio that will accommodate outdoor diners. The bathrooms don’t replicate the old, marble designs. Instead, modern toilets and sinks were installed.

“The hope is the tenant will bring in an outdoor bar here and maybe a kitchen area,” Fetter said, adding that “there’s strong interest” from restaurant developers to occupy the building.

“We’ve probably spoken to at least 100 people who are interested,” Fetter said. “I would say we have had serious interest from 15 to 20 well-known operators in the area.”

Many compare the project to restoration of the old Santa Fe train depot at the Del Mar Station in Pasadena, also designed by Spectra and now occupied by two restaurants: La Grand Orange Cafe and The Luggage Room.

After buying the old depot in 2013 as part of a deal to sell land for Metro’s Gold Line maintenance yard, the city learned the Gold Line could not be used as a station. Instead, the city looked at re-uses such as the restaurants along the tracks in Pasadena, said former Monrovia mayor Mary Ann Lutz.

“Once they did such a great job in Pasadena at Del Mar, we envisioned it to be something special like that restaurant,” Lutz said.

Fetter said he hopes to sign a lease for a restaurant by January, in time for a ribbon cutting ceremony. Hopefully a restaurant/bar establishment can open those giant, oval doors to customers by next summer, he said.