With its 100th anniversary approaching in December, the Museum of Riverside remains closed, just as it’s been since its 93rd anniversary. Plans for a long-awaited renovation are proceeding by inches, the start of work still months away.
But the museum, while still quiet, is clearing its throat.
The museum’s greatest hits are now on view at an alternate site. “Dear Riverside,” as the show is called, presents 100 items to mark 100 years.
The exhibit will run through Jan. 5 at the Center for Social Justice and Civil Liberties. (The center’s 3865 Market St. home, incidentally, is itself in a piece of old Riverside, a 1927 Spanish Revival building best remembered as home to Citrus Savings and Loan.)
I attended the opening reception last Thursday. As someone who cares about Riverside and cares about history, I felt like I ought to be there. The museum’s inaccessibility had only whetted my interest.
Opened in 1924 after the donation of a collection of Native American artifacts, the museum over the years expanded to a reputed 200,000 items. Its centennial will be celebrated with a gala on Dec. 12, the exact date of the opening.
“Dear Riverside,” a centennial exhibition by the Museum of Riverside, presents 100 objects in honor of its 100 years. As the museum is closed in preparation for a renovation, the exhibit is housed at the Center for Social Justice and Civil Liberties. (Photo by David Allen, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)
The museum, I’m told, used to feature displays on anthropology, regional history and natural science, including a nature lab. The knock against it was that, as with a lot of stodgy, diorama-filled natural history museums, the exhibits rarely changed. You could go once and never go again.
Now, after the museum closed in 2017, no one can go at all.
“We are still with you, even in the absence of our main site,” said Robyn Peterson, the museum’s director, in her remarks to dozens of guests at the reception.
“A centennial is a significant milestone in the museum world,” Peterson continued, “and we couldn’t let it pass without acknowledging it.”
Tracy Fisher, director of the Center for Social Justice, said she’d been talking with Peterson for two years about hosting the show.
“It’s a landmark exhibit, 100 years in the making,” Fisher said.
City officials had things to say, as city officials will.
“This museum has always been a part of my life and a part of Riverside’s life,” said Mayor Patricia Lock Dawson, a Riverside native. “There is value in local stories and local culture.”
This melodeon, a type of reed organ, was brought to Riverside by a family relocating from Minnesota in 1872, only two years after the community was founded. It’s one of the 100 items from the Museum of Riverside’s collection now on display in “Dear Riverside.” (Photo by David Allen, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)
Philip Falcone, a newly seated councilmember, said he’d been among those galvanized into action by the museum’s closing, volunteering for its board of directors.
A favorite memory from third grade, Falcone said with a smile, was touring the museum to see the stuffed mountain lion, Henry.
“We are more than just the museum with a mountain lion,” Falcone declared.
That’s true. Although if you have a mountain lion, what more do you need?
I asked Peterson about it.
“The museum has two mountain lions,” she clarified. “It was a beloved feature of the old museum.”
One mountain lion is on display in “Dear Riverside.” Former third-graders will be pleased to hear that. It’s in a clear case, with some ribs of a wooden crate around that, to emphasize the storage aspect.
“You could push a button and it would growl,” Peterson said of the lion. “That’s a nostalgia thing for Riverside residents. It’s something people tell me about all the time.”
When I made my way back to the exhibit from the reception, I peered at the mountain lion, then found the button nearby. I pushed it. At first all I heard was an electronic buzz. I tried again. I rarely push buttons hard enough. It’s a failing.
This time there was a growl from a speaker overhead. Kind of a long, faint rumble, like distant thunder.
The other 99 items include Native American basketry, hearkening back to the museum’s start. There’s also a 5-foot segment of a mastodon tusk, unearthed during excavation for a railroad bridge in 1903.
Many cultures are represented. An 1840s photograph of local violinist Juan Castillo. A reproduction of a business sign for an early Black-owned business in town, Johnson Carriage Co.
A soy pot and pipe from the city’s Chinatown. Postcards exchanged by members of the Harada family when they were held at different internment camps during World War II.
This simple stool made of wood and linen was taken by the Harada family of Riverside when freed from the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah in 1945. The stool, postcards and other family items are part of “Dear Riverside,” a Museum of Riverside centennial exhibition. (Photo by David Allen, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)
The exhibit’s centerpiece is plant and animal specimens collected in the Mojave Desert by naturalist Edmund Jaeger, who was an early advocate for the Joshua tree and who discovered the first known hibernating bird. (I had first learned about him from the digest Desert Oracle without realizing he was from Riverside.)
Items on display include a small, preserved Joshua tree and a few taxidermied creatures, among them a red diamond rattlesnake eating a granite spiny lizard, the lizard halfway into the rattlesnake’s mouth.
If I were in third grade, I’m not sure which I’d like more, the mountain lion or the meal-in-progress. But why choose?
Speaking of which, with 200,000 items in its collection, museum officials had tough choices to make to pick just 100 for “Dear Riverside.”
The goal, Peterson told me, was “to give a taste of the breadth of the collection.”
She added: “Besides the 100 items here, there are 199,900 more in storage.”
As a newcomer, it was nice to finally see some of them.
After all, the museum closed three years before I got here, has been closed the four years I’ve been here and may not reopen for three years more. I would hope to be here, but who’s to say.
Reopening, earlier promised for 2025 and 2026, is now projected for early 2027. Even if that happens, the museum will have been closed for roughly 10 years, from its 93rd to 102nd birthdays.
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“Dear Riverside,” in other words, is a rare opportunity. After the exhibit closes Jan. 5, the Museum of Riverside, like Brigadoon, will vanish into the mists again.
City Manager Mike Futrell told the reception guests that a decision on final funding for the museum renovation and expansion will go before the City Council on Sept. 17.
“We will begin construction,” Futrell declared, “in six months.” Registering the lack of excitement that timeline drew, he quickly added: “Maybe less!”
Mountain lion, faintly: “Grrrrowl.”
David Allen writes Wednesday, Friday and (grrrrowl) Sunday. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on X.
