Northside - City of Riverside

This is not only evident in the architectural styles represented, but the streetscape
also reveals the area’s rural past and shifts in, or a piecemeal approach to, municipal
residential planning efforts as sidewalks, landscaped parkways, and street trees are
shifted or absent along different areas of the same streets. Street lighting is sparse
and consists of a mix of freestanding, marbelite and utility-pole-mounted mast arm
lighting throughout the area. Similarly, the absence of streetscape improvements,
even curbs and gutters in some areas, along Strong Street give it a pastoral feel, one
that is enhanced to the east as lot sizes grow larger and use more rural past Main
Street and even more so beyond Orange Street.
EARLY SETTLEMENT ON THE NORTHSIDE, 1870-1900
Beginning in 1870, two settlements emerged in a portion of the San Bernardino
Valley - the Southern California Colony on the former Jurupa Rancho land, which
would soon be called “Riverside,” and the New England Colony (named in 1874)
in the former Hartshorn Tract, which would be dubbed the “Village of Arlington.”
North of the Southern California Colony were the established farming villages of
La Placita and Agua Mansa and between the colonies lay the mile-wide strip of
land owned by the federal government – the Government Tract. Although the two
colonies and the Government Tract were initially independently owned, they were
soon linked in their dependence on canal irrigation and rail transportation to
support the driving economy of the times – agriculture, specifically, the growth of
citrus – and consolidated under one municipality. Those who settled on the
Northside within the former Jurupa Rancho lands favored dairy and general
agricultural production.
HISTORY
With the completion of the transcontinental railroad to San Francisco in 1869,
tourists, boomers and boosters flowed into California at an estimated rate of 70,000
per year, a stream that was soon diffused into the southern region of the state. After
an initial boom that soon waned, the region experienced a period of quiet but
substantial growth, with improvements in water supply and agricultural
production. The arrival of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe (ATSF) line into
California in 1886 rejuvenated earlier expectations and marked the beginning of a
real estate explosion. Competition between ATSF and the Southern Pacific Company
facilitated unprecedented migration and settlement into the region from the East
and Midwest.
The legendary boom of the eighties was more subdued in Riverside, differing in
timing, extent, and impact. The northern connection of the transcontinental rail line
to Riverside in 1876 and its connection to the east in 1883 contributed to an earlier,
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