Eastside
Citrus Historic District
Commerce St. between 5th & 6th St., Riverside
These dilapidated 19th-century warehouses, loading dock, and abandoned railroad tracks are all that remain of the once-booming citrus packinghouse district, the predecessor to today’s logistics. A few blocks away, the historically multiracial community that grew around the industry has endured.
Eastside’s tight-knit community was part of the labor force that did the picking, sorting, and packing of citrus. Though the neighborhood was (and still is) segregated and under-invested in, it was always people powered. No one went hungry. Fruit from packinghouses and places like Tony’s Market, Zacatecas Cafe, and the Community Settlement Association made sure of it. Neighbors supported each other, offering truck rides to citrus groves for work and organizing for better wages and schools.
When citrus and military jobs faded, decades of rezoning and redevelopment hindered neighborhood growth. Seeing Riverside’s citrus distribution networks in ruins and thinking about how this commercial corridor was a forerunner to our current logistics economy raises questions: what happens to today’s generation of warehouses and distribution centers, which have disrupted neighborhoods across the region, when another economic shift empties them too?
From the Archives
by A People’s History of the I.E.
Click on the images below to uncover the story.
In the late 19th century, the citrus industry made Riverside wealthy, with the highest per capita income in the U.S. Irrigation canals, packinghouses, and the transcontinental railways formed the backbone of the region's industrial agriculture.
The infrastructure of the citrus industry laid the groundwork for today’s supply chain logistics, which is the second biggest business in the state. Three different train lines, an irrigation canal, and a palm-tree-lined avenue once ran parallel along Commerce St. The corridor also included freight and passenger depots and a multitude of spurs and platforms for cars to load fruit from the adjacent packinghouses.
Aerial view of Commerce St., with Santa Fe Station in center, 1968. Historic American Engineering Record, Library of Congress.
Visitors to Riverside and other citrus belt cities circulated brightly colored postcards of golden fruit, verdant groves, and snow-capped mountains. These images celebrated an imagined harmony between innovative technology, profitable industry, and cultivated nature. They also highlighted Southern California’s distinction from other industrial cities.
Postcard, “Traveling through the Orange Groves, in Riverside, California,” 1910s. Courtesy C. Gudis.
Trains carried passengers as well as citrus fruit. To entice tourists, Riversiders emphasized a fantasy heritage of Spanish Dons and sultry Señoritas in their dress and city architecture.
“Greet ‘Em with Oranges” opening of Union Pacific station promotional photo by Riverside Chamber of Commerce, 1926. Museum of Riverside.
The now-covered Gage Canal runs parallel to the train tracks along Commerce St. The irrigation canal enabled citrus production to double soon after it was completed in the late 1880s. Open canals collected sand, mud, and plants, requiring periodic closure and cleanup, as these youth had to do in 1920. Eastsiders played in the canal (despite the dangers) until it was covered over.
Black youth cleaning Gage Canal (1920), Museum of Riverside.
The historic industrial citrus corridor included cold storage and machine shops like the Iron Works brick building, just south at Vine St. This photo demonstrates the newly invented clamp truck manufactured there. The new processing and refrigeration technologies sped up production creating an efficient citrus supply chain.
Man loading train car with clamp truck, 1930s. Special Collections & University Archives, UC Riverside
A few dilapidated 19th-century warehouses are all that remain of the once-booming citrus packinghouse industrial district along historic Pachappa Ave (Commerce St. today). From here, oranges and other citrus fruits were transported across the nation and to the world, much in the same way that Amazon and other big box warehouses transport goods to stores and consumers.
“Gilmore’s Trucks” reads the sign on the warehouse at the corner of 5th and Commerce for the now-shuttered structure. Built in the 1890s as a citrus packinghouse, serving Pachappa, Strachan, and other fruit growers, the building is desolate. Its likely future is either demolition by neglect or razing for redevelopment.
View of the corner of Fifth and Commerce St., Riverside, 2023, courtesy of Henry Apodaca
Unfortunately, all that’s left of the National Orange Co. Packing House on Commerce St. is a vacant lot and an old loading dock. Opened in 1898, it was the world’s oldest operating packinghouse when it burned down in 2001.
A few blocks away, Blue Banner Co., on Third St., is the only citrus packing house still operating in the historic district.
Historic American Engineering Record, National Orange Company packinghouse, 1968, Library of Congress
Sutherland Fruit Company’s false front Mission Revival style packinghouse still stands (Old Spaghetti Factory, 3191 Mission Inn Ave.). It was where tourists could watch fruit packing in action from a specially constructed elevated deck. Afterwards, visitors could sample fruit and ship it home.
Sutherland Fruit Co. packinghouse interior, visitor’s reception room, 1890s, Museum of Riverside.
Chinese laborers lent their expertise to the growing citrus industry in the late nineteenth century. They pose for this photo at F. B. Devine packinghouse at 6th and Pachappa / Commerce in 1888.
Chinese workers and, in the center background in white shirtsleeves, C.G. Warren,1888. Special Collections & University Archives, UC Riverside.
Since at least the 1920s Latinas worked in citrus packinghouses. In the 1930s they were paid 33 cents a box. By World War II they performed the majority of packinghouse labor. Often women formed close relationships while working on the line.
Lupe Vasquez, Margaret Rodriguez, and Elsie Frogge of Riverside, 1940s. Museum of Riverside.
![“I had an aunt that used to work there, and sometimes I would ask her, ‘How do you wrap those oranges so fast?’ [She] says, Mija, we just put the orange in the paper in our hand, and then the orange and twist them, and then put it in the box.“
—](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/660db30af17a6f2004fa1946/e1c2f9d9-292e-4f06-a473-0bfcbd0bccee/2-packing-house-broad-view-line-of-women.png)
“I had an aunt that used to work there, and sometimes I would ask her, ‘How do you wrap those oranges so fast?’ [She] says, Mija, we just put the orange in the paper in our hand, and then the orange and twist them, and then put it in the box.“
— Esther Ambriz
Latinas are still the primary labor for sorting, grading, and packing citrus, though contemporary practices rarely include the branded paper wrappers of a previous generation. Then and now, the warehouses are noisy and the assembly line requires repetitive movements at a fast pace.
Photo by Thomas McGovern from the series “Manos, Espaldas, y Blossoms,” 2017, courtesy of the artist.
Today’s warehouses and distribution centers share characteristics with the packinghouses of yesterday beyond their location along rail and truck lines. Both are low wage, often temporary jobs, and in noisy and fast paced environments subject to excessive heat or cold. Packers do backbreaking work to keep up with fast-moving assembly lines. Automation is displacing workers in both industries.
Amazon sorting line, 2015. Reuters/Robert Galbraith.
Until the late 1950s, citrus groves still stretched north and east of Commerce St., adjacent to the residential neighborhoods. In the first decades of the 20th century, picking citrus was done by many white and immigrant Eastsiders, while many African Americans worked for the railroads and trucking. By the 1960s groves were becoming tract housing and industry. Most citrus moved to the Central Valley.
Bicycles enabled men to travel from grove to grove, seeking better pay and working conditions. The Japanese Labor Bureau on the corner of 14th and Pachappa, for instance, also housed a bike shop.
Japanese citrus laborer bicycling in groves, Riverside Public Library
Most family members helped during the citrus harvest. The smallest kids scrambled under the trees to find fallen fruit, or to pick from the lowest branches. Mexican families fondly called them “ratas.”
Many would leave to follow the harvest of other crops during the summer.
Members of the Eastside Venegas, Lozano, and Vasquez families harvested apricots in Hemet during the summers, 1940s, courtesy of Manuel Venegas, peopleshistoryie.org
While citrus boosters often portrayed the citrus industry with bucolic images of beautiful clean groves, the production of citrus often polluted the environment and impacted workers’ health. To protect groves from frost, workers would burn oil in smudge pots to create billowing smoke. Neighbors downwind remember soot covering window sills and having to take in laundry to avoid the heavy smoke damaging their clothes.
Nighttime smudge-pot lighting in groves. Special Collections & University Archives, UC Riverside.
From 1942 to 1964, Mexican nationals called braceros were brought to Riverside as citrus laborers. They filled jobs left vacant when other men entered the military or more lucrative defense work. Longtime Eastside resident Joe Venegas, Sr., whose family had emigrated from Mexico in the 1910s, was a crew leader, trucking braceros to and from different groves.
Joe Venegas Sr. (bottom left, next to his son) and braceros, working at L.V.W. Brown groves, 1950s. Courtesy of Manuel and Yolanda Venegas, peopleshistoryie.org
Pickers today are mostly Latino immigrant men. Their labor is handled in similar fashion as logistics. They are hired by third parties as needed.
After the citrus boom came to a slow halt farmland and groves in the I.E. offered warehouse developers a needed expanse of property; the same thing is beginning to happen in the Central Valley.
Photo by Thomas McGovern from the series “Manos, Espaldas, y Blossoms,” 2017, courtesy of the artist
Immigrants filled Riverside’s agricultural labor needs, and a diverse Eastside grew in service to the citrus and agricultural industry. Black and Mexican families lived alongside white working people and Japanese and Korean settlements.
Chinese men lived in wooden shacks when they built the railroad here in the 1880s. Korean families later moved in, creating Pachappa Camp — the first organized Koreatown in the U.S. It was labeled on maps as “Korean Shanties” and was across the street “Japanese Shanties.”
Mary Paik Lee describes where she lived from 1906-11 as one room with dirt floors and no plumbing or electricity. To earn some money, Lee’s mother cooked food for thirty single men who worked in the groves. She bought, on credit, the supplies from Chinatown, though she couldn’t communicate in Chinese or in English.
Korean boy near a settlement along the railroad tracks, Special Collections & University Archives, UC Riverside. Courtesy YOK Center for Korean American Studies
The Harada family bought a house in Eastside in the name of their American-born children since the California Alien Land Law (1912) prohibited Japanese immigrants from owning land. A few years later, they did the same thing on Lemon St., but their white neighbors complained and took them to court. The Haradas won the case, though they did not overturn the Alien Land Law. Japanese immigrants did not gain the right to become naturalized citizens and own land until 1952.
Family of Jukichi and Ken Harada, Museum of Riverside
Gilbert G. Vasquez (1933-2024), seen here in uniform, had a similar trajectory as other Eastside Latinos of his generation. The military was a route out of citrus work. Vasquez went on to serve 30 years in the Sheriff’s Department.
Vasquez family photo at 2522 11th Street, 1942, Riverside County Mexican American Historical Society, peopleshistoryie.org
Cars meant social and economic mobility for working families in the early 20th century. Car culture and cruising crossed racial barriers. At Buster’s Auto Repair, elite whites and neighborhood kids could learn from Buster Jones’s mechanical and life’s wisdom.
Toni Allison, 4; Albert Wallace, Jr., 2; and 1948 Chrysler Windsor at 4517 Howard Ave., Riverside, 1952. Shades of Riverside, Riverside Public Library.
Car clubs host significant community and social events in the I.E.
Commerce St. has been a space of congregation and display of vintage lowriders, despite the driving hazard of abandoned railroad tracks. Significant development is planned for Commerce St., including a cut-through at Fourth St. to make way for the Third St. underpass. A residential development is planned for Commerce from Mission Inn Ave. to Fifth St., which will preserve the turn-of-the-century warehouse which served citrus and as Barley Mills. Enjoy the citrus industrial historic corridor while its remains are still visible!
Commerce St. car show, 2023, photo courtesy Diana Campos
Tight social networks were forged within the Eastside as neighbors gathered in parks, shops, and other spaces. People watched out for each other within this multiracial neighborhood, which felt like a small town built within the boundaries of the segregated city of Riverside. Some people of color opened shops to serve the community, which enabled them to leave agricultural labor. Prior to the late 1960s, however, their options for housing outside of the Eastside remained limited.
Many small shops along Park Ave. served as both commercial spine and a community network.
Tony and Mary Chavarrios ran the small grocery store at 4098 Park Ave. from 1939 to 1985, which had been previously owned by George Sakaguchi and by one of three Black investors who built the Colored Mercantile Hall (Orange Valley Lodge #13) in 1905 on 12th St.
Tony’s Market is still open.
Photo of Tony, Mary, Juanita, and Betty Chavarrios with their friend Lucy, (late 1940s). Riverside County Mexican American Historical Society, peopleshistoryie.org
Oscar and Josefina Medina opened Zacatecas restaurant in 1963, a cafe without color lines, where all were welcome. Though it has moved twice since, Zacatecas remains a family-run Eastside hub, as much for the chismé (gossip) as the food.
Max and Josefina Medina sitting at the counter of Zacatecas, c. 1971, courtesy of William Medina, peopleshistoryie.org.
Painter-sculptor Leer Larkin ran Nosotros Fine Arts Workshop, a few doors away from Zacatecas Cafe, from the 1970s until he died in 1992. He worked to benefit the Eastside, starting outdoor art classes in the mid ‘60s, making Nosotros a cultural gathering place for poets, artists, and performers, and consistently standing up for social justice.
Suzi Medina and Leer Larkin at Zacatecas on University Ave., 1990. Courtesy of William Medina, peopleshistoryie.org.
Lincoln Park was the heart of the community. It was built in 1924 with a pool and 3 buildings to house the Community Settlement House. Lincoln Park hosted wildly popular and competitive nighttime baseball games. In the 1940s, Eastside and Casablanca team rivalries became newsworthy, and the papers talked regularly about bad behavior between the “gangs.”
Eastside Merchant Team, 1948. Riverside County Mexican American Historical Society, peopleshistoryie.org.
Orange Valley Masonic Lodge #13 opened in 1905 on 12th St. and Park Ave. The first floor was a grocery, housing, and, in 1965, a Freedom School that provided education to Eastside students when their parents demanded school integration. The second floor hosted Black organizations, Filipino dances, and campaign meetings for BIPOC politicians. The lodge was also a stump stop for white politicians and Black civic figures.
Group photograph of members of the Order of the Eastern Star standing in front of Orange Valley Lodge #13, 1950s. Oakland Public Library.
In 2021, Juan Navarro opened Eastside Artspace, a communal art studio. Some Eastsiders remember this stretch of Park Ave. from the 1940s, when the Lopez family had a grocery, and where Palmer’s Chicken Shack opened by 1945, with Palmer’s Dry Cleaners next door. In 1960, Blue Note Record Shop moved in, another local institution.
Navarro is Artist-In-Residence at the Riverside Art Museum, and has painted murals throughout this stretch of Eastside with the collaboration of community members, to remind us of Eastside’s vibrant past and present.
Artists of Eastside Arthouse at 4177 Park Avenue, 2022, courtesy eastsidearthouse.studio
Resources
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Community Settlement Association has focused on family wellness, education, civic engagement, cultural awareness, and strengthening the community in Riverside since 1911.
Riverside Neighbors Opposing Warehouses (R-NOW) is a community group organized to oppose industrial warehouses in open space near March Air Force Base.
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A People’s History of the I.E., Claiming Our Space: Eastside Riverside’s Black Community, 1910-1960.
Café Stories: Riverside’s Zacatecas by William Medina.
More Dreamers of the Golden Dream book by Susan Straight and Doug McCullough, published by Inlandia Institute.
Riverside.org features Black history and memories of Riverside’s Eastside neighborhood.
TOTA Eastside Stories with Buddy Jones brings together Black residents of Eastside who grew up together in the 1950s-60s and beyond.
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Eastside Art House is a communal art studio and gallery on historic Park Avenue.
Riverside Art Museum and The Cheech Museum regularly present artists from the region.
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Museum of Riverside stewards local history collections and the National Historic Landmark Harada House, where the Harada family lived and tested the Alien Land Law in 1915, which deemed “aliens ineligible for citizenship” from owning property in the state.
A People’s History of the I.E. digital archive of Riverside Collections.
UC Riverside Special Collections has the Kim family archive, documenting the Korean American experience in Riverside.
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