Inland Empire’s Riverside and San Bernardino : ‘Berlin Wall’ of Rivalry Divides 2 Cities

Riverside and San Bernardino, the two largest cities in the booming Inland Empire, are only 10 miles apart, but they have very different personalities.

San Bernardino is a rough-and-tumble town, where the former mayor once accused a City Council critic of behaving like a “gorilla in heat” and the county sheriff talks about his problems with “motorsickle” gangs.

Riverside, on the other hand, prides itself on civility and graciousness. Civic warfare is no less fierce than in San Bernardino, but the weapon of choice is more likely to be the rapier than the sledgehammer.

In an argument about land-use policy, a Riverside attorney once accused his opponent of being a “quiche eater,” an epithet seldom heard in the hurly-burly political exchanges of San Bernardino.

The two cities have little to do with each other.

“They might as well be divided by the Berlin Wall,” said John Holmes, who views the rivalry from a neutral post as city manager of nearby Redlands.

The Riverside Press-Enterprise, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1968, devotes much space to international news but little space to San Bernardino. Likewise, the San Bernardino Sun pays little attention to Riverside.

Business leaders say the two cities should cooperate to fend off the strong economic challenge of Ontario and other communities at the western end of the Inland Empire, but so far little has happened.

Even an attempt to merge three struggling symphony orchestras, in Redlands, Riverside and San Bernardino, into a stronger regional orchestra failed.

“You expect me to play the violin next to somebody from San Berdo?” asked an incredulous Riverside musician.

Observers in both cities suggested that differing histories account, at least in part, for the rivalry and for the contrasting civic styles.

“This was a rough workingman’s town and Riverside was a quiet, peaceful, rich man’s town,” said Gene Wood, vice president and manager of the Security Pacific National Bank in San Bernardino.

A colony of Mormons founded San Bernardino in 1854 but three years later Brigham Young summoned the colony back to Utah, unhappy, he wrote, “at the sight of so many of the saints running to California, chiefly after the god of this world.”

In the late 1800s, railroad workers poured into San Bernardino to build and maintain the Southern Pacific, Union Pacific and Santa Fe lines, and the city acquired a blue-collar character it has never entirely lost.

In contrast, many of the earliest residents of Riverside were citrus growers or wealthy Easterners or Midwesterners in search of a pleasant place to spend the winter.

When the California boom of the 1880s collapsed, Riverside was spared the worst effects by a group of London investors who came to the rescue of the citrus growers and the water companies and introduced a British influence that lingers on.

One of Riverside’s main thoroughfares is Victoria Avenue. Although the Riverside Polo Club is long gone, the Victoria Country Club survives, the city’s oldest and most prestigious.

San Bernardino’s leaders worry about the city’s image as a hot, smoggy haven for redneck racists, outlaw cyclists and blue-collar lunch bucket carriers whose “demographics” do not appeal to the slick new entrepreneurs of the Inland Empire.

They argue that the Hells Angels (who got their start in San Bernardino or in nearby Fontana or Rialto--there are conflicting accounts) and the Ku Klux Klan are things of the past and that the city now has more white-collar than blue-collar workers. But old reputations are hard to shake.

Image Problem

“We still have an image problem,” said Bill Wood, manager of the Chamber of Commerce. “It’s no longer true, but the image is still there--the blue-collar or cowboy image or whatever you want to call it.”

Some economists and other students of the region believe that the negative image is an important reason for the relatively slow commercial and industrial growth of the Inland Empire in general and the San Bernardino area in particular.

So a great deal of energy and ingenuity go into efforts to dispel that image.

Advertising brochures for San Bernardino and surrounding communities are illustrated with photographs of Lake Arrowhead or the San Bernardino Mountains, taken on clear winter or spring days.

They are not taken in summer or fall, when the mountains often disappear into the smog.

Some other parts of San Bernardino’s image problem are real.

Relations between whites and nonwhites often are testy, although they have improved since the late 1960s and early ‘70s, when firemen carried shotguns to answer calls in the minority neighborhoods of West San Bernardino.

These black and Latino neighborhoods are cut off from the rest of San Bernardino by Interstate 215, which has become a textbook case of poor social planning in freeway construction.

“But in the high schools,” Cohn added, “there is a growing separation between blacks and whites, a growing mistrust.”

The crime rate is high. In 1983, the murder rate was the third highest in the state, behind Fresno and the Los Angeles-Long Beach area.

San Bernardino County Sheriff Floyd Tidwell said other problems include drug smugglers, the Ku Klux Klan and illegal cock fights and dog fights, in addition to the notorious “motorsickle gangs.”

Tidwell offered an unusual explanation for the county’s high incidence of homicide.

“This is a dumping ground for corpses that got murdered someplace else,” he said. “If every dead body from Los Angeles and Orange County stood up, why, the desert would look like a jungle.”

To patrol this vast county--20,165 square miles, largest in the 48 mainland states--Tidwell’s department uses eight helicopters and three fixed-wing aircraft. They recently added a new, nine-passenger jet helicopter that cruises at 175 miles per hour and can deliver sheriff’s deputies to any location in the county in 50 minutes. But the sheriff said his force of 900 sworn deputies needs to be increased by at least 150 in order to do its job.

Strange as it may seem in a region generally thought to be arid, San Bernardino suffers from having too much water.

High Water Problem

Winter runoff, adding to existing underground supplies and supplemental purchases of Northern California water, have created a high water problem in much of downtown.

Many buildings, including City Hall, must pump water from their basements during the winter and spring months.

“If we had a major earthquake, we could have severe problems with liquefaction (the watery collapse of unstable soil),” said Louis Fletcher, general manager of the San Bernardino Valley Municipal Water District. “We could lose a lot of buildings downtown.”

Despite these problems, real and imagined, San Bernardino has been participating in the general prosperity being enjoyed throughout the Inland Empire.

After some years of little or no growth, the city’s population now is increasing 2% to 3% a year. Plenty of land is available and housing prices remain reasonable.

The average cost of a three-bedroom, single-family home last year was $80,000, while two-bedroom apartments rented for $375 to $450 a month, according to the San Bernardino Redevelopment Agency.

Downtown San Bernardino is undergoing a face lift.

The 32-year-old redevelopment agency, one of the busiest in the state, has been responsible for about $1 billion worth of new projects, including a new City Hall, a hotel and convention center and the 103-store Central City Mall.

However, the 13-story hotel stands empty because a Los Angeles developer has been unable to come up with the $5 million needed to furnish the building.

A new city library is about to open. There are plans for a 65-acre “urban park,” with a lake and recreational facilities, and for an additional $25 million in new parking structures and other downtown improvements.

Several new “office parks” have been built on the outskirts of San Bernardino and more are planned. The Southland Corp. (7-Eleven stores) has built a large warehouse and distribution center in the city and other new industries have moved in.

However, commercial and industrial growth is slower in the San Bernardino area than it is at the western end of the county, near Ontario International Airport.

“The boom is moving east but it’s not quite here yet,” said Gene Wood of Security Pacific National Bank.

But Wood and other San Bernardino business leaders expect the boom to arrive eventually because the area has all the elements needed for economic growth--affordable land, a large work force and a lower wage scale than is found in Los Angeles or Orange counties and most of the needed “infrastructure,” such as roads, sewers and flood control facilities.

In addition, Wood said, local politicians are displaying a more cooperative attitude toward potential residential and commercial developers.

“In the past 20 years we’ve had a couple of opportunities to become a high-growth area,” he said, “but there was a lack of cooperation on the part of elected city and county officials.”

Pro-Growth look

Now most of these officials are enthusiastically pro-growth.

“We want any industry that brings in jobs and tax base,” San Bernardino County Supervisor Cal McElwain said in an interview. “We’re not going to say anybody and his brother can come in, but right now we’re willing to talk to anybody and, offhand, I can’t think of anybody we’ve turned down.”

In Riverside, attitudes toward the recent population explosion, and accompanying economic bustle, are much more mixed.

Riverside County’s population increased 4.4% last year, the highest rate of increase among the state’s large counties.

With affordable land and housing in short supply in Southern California, an even bigger boom is expected in the near future.

“We’re right on the verge of some tremendous growth here,” said Riverside City Manager Douglas G. Weiford.

This is exciting to builders, developers and local promoters, but not to many others.

“If we don’t watch out, this is going to become another Orange County,” said citrus grower and anti-growth leader George Buster, expressing a sentiment that was repeated often during recent interviews.

Many Riverside citizens pride themselves on being as concerned with preserving the best of the past as they are with accommodating future growth.

A citrus “heritage park” is planned for the Arlington Heights area, where some groves survive.

Much civic heaving and groaning, plus an estimated $6 million in redevelopment funds, have gone into efforts to save the Mission Inn, a 100-year-old fortress of a hotel that stands in the center of downtown Riverside.

President Theodore Roosevelt planted an orange tree in the hotel’s patio in 1903 and Presidents William McKinley, Benjamin Harrison and William Howard Taft are said to have stayed there as well. Richard M. Nixon was married there in 1940.

The city boasts a University of California campus, which is the home of the statewide Air Pollution Research Center.

Active Women

Unlike San Bernardino, where the environmental movement is weak, Riverside has several active conservation and environmental groups, led largely by formidable women.

(Irked at being excluded from the Monday Morning Group, an organization of business and professional men that meets not on Monday but on Wednesday, some of these women organized the Wednesday Morning Group, which meets, of course, on Monday.)

When Riverside was hit by what City Planning Commissioner Max Neiman called a “paroxysm of growth” between 1976 and 1978, many of these historically minded and environmentally oriented people were upset.

“It was anything goes,” said environmentalist Judy Orttung. “The developers were getting whatever they wanted.”

Opponents formed an organization called Riversiders for Reasonable Growth and collected 13,000 signatures to place Proposition R on the November, 1979, ballot.

Proposition R sought to prevent high-density development by establishing an agricultural zone, with five-acre minimum lots, in the 5,200-acre Arlington Heights “greenbelt” and in the 600-acre La Sierra portion of western Riverside.

The proposition also required a minimum two-acre lot size in any hillside area with a slope of more than 15%.

Voters approved Proposition R by a 2-1 margin and also elected a City Council majority that was committed to implementing the measure.

Proposition R is not popular with everyone.

One of its sharpest critics is attorney Walter Ingalls, who spent 10 years in the Legislature as Riverside’s first Democratic assemblyman before returning to practice law in 1982. Among his clients are many builders and developers.

The measure “stopped development in Riverside,” Ingalls said, sending developers eastward to what was then Sunnymead and is now part of the newly incorporated city of Moreno Valley.

Others say Riverside’s growth slowed, but did not stop, after the passage of Proposition R and that the slowdown was due as much to the recession of the early 1980s as it was to the density measure.

Ingalls sees the passage of Proposition R, and the attempt to preserve the Mission Inn, as typical of Riverside’s “peculiar combination of nostalgia and pretension.”

‘Pretension’ Rapped

“There is nostalgia for the times when there was no Palm Springs and Riverside was a popular resort, when there were ‘gentleman farmers’ and that sort of thing and Presidents stopped at the Mission Inn,” he said. “The pretension is that Riverside is still that kind of place.

“Well, it isn’t true. This is a nice place to live, but people around the country don’t say to each other, ‘Should we go to Miami this weekend or should we go to Riverside?’ ”

Ingalls believes the money spent on the Mission Inn should have been used to lure new industry, so that Riverside doesn’t become simply a “bedroom community.”

He said the city is held back by “unimaginative, Old Guard leadership,” supported by the Press-Enterprise and by an assortment of “quiche eaters and wives of tenured faculty” at the University of California.

Rosanna Scott, one of the leaders of the Proposition R campaign, said Ingalls’ comments could be understood “only if you know he has many clients who own Proposition R land that can’t be developed.”

Although Proposition R is still on the books, and is still being implemented for the most part, there has been a change in the political climate since the 1983 defeat of the two City Council members who supported the measure most vigorously.

The City Council has granted an exemption for one 500-unit apartment complex (Ingalls represented the developer) and is considering others.

A study commissioned by the council found that citrus growing is not economical for most landowners in the “greenbelt” area. A second report, due soon, is expected to recommend development of portions of the area now protected by Proposition R.

Both development interests and Riversiders for Reasonable Growth are raising money for the renewed battle they see ahead.

“The ‘greenbelt,’ the orange groves, all of that, go deep into the heart of the city,” said Arthur Littleworth, a prominent water rights attorney. “I think most people would like to see them preserved--it’s very important to the community.

‘Tremendous Pressure’

“But there is tremendous pressure for development and the growers have been saying for a long time they can’t make any money with citrus. . . . You probably cannot, in the long run, maintain land in a use pattern that isn’t economic.”

Littleworth predicted that developers “will probably win” the greenbelt fight unless the land and groves are purchased with city or private money.

Meanwhile, new saviors apparently have been found for the Mission Inn--New York and Wisconsin investors who say they will spend $28 million to rehabilitate the old hotel.

Some years ago the Riverside City Council refused even to apply for redevelopment projects, but the current council pursues them aggressively.

A downtown shopping mall failed, as have others in many cities, but redevelopment has made possible the renovation of some downtown office buildings and even the construction of new single-family housing.

The new convention center has been losing money but there are hopes for improvement when a nearby Sheraton Hotel opens in 1986 and if and when the Mission Inn rehabilitation is completed.

Along with the spurt of new development, Riverside also has enjoyed improved air quality.

“The last few years have been really good news,” said James N. Pitts, director of the UC Riverside smog research center. “We’ve had some breaks with the weather and control measures (by the South Coast Air Quality Management District) have paid off dramatically.”

Relations between Riverside police and the city’s Latino population have been strained over the years, especially in the “Casa Blanca” barrio, but things seem to be better now.

However Casa Blanca residents say the neighborhood still is troubled by unemployment, a high dropout rate in the schools and drug problems.

Concerned about a growing gap between population and available jobs, a group of Riverside businessmen raised $1.6 million last year to launch an ambitious drive for new industry called “Keep Riverside Ahead.”

“Our analysis showed that 15% to 20% of Riverside residents were working in Los Angeles and Orange counties,” said Art Pick, manager of the Riverside Chamber of Commerce. “If we were to be something other than a bedroom community, we needed to accelerate our efforts to find appropriate industries that would be compatible with the community.”

Key Words

But the key words are “appropriate” and “compatible.”

“This isn’t San Bernardino,” said UC Riverside political scientist Frances Carney. “They are for smokestacks over there. If they have to choke while counting their money, that’s fine with them, but that wouldn’t go in Riverside. We’re much more cautious and conservative.”

Or, as Rosanna Scott put it, “We have a very healthy balance between environmentalists, if you want to call them that, and development interests. We all know the players; we all know the rules. We keep each other in check in what has become a very sophisticated game.”

RIVERSIDE Founded 1870 Incorporated 1883 Size 72.7 square miles Population 183400 Median household income $17,863 Taxable sales $1,422,046,000 (1984 calendar year) New residential units, 1984 1,180

SAN BERNARDINO Incorporated 1854 Size 55 square miles Population 134,700 Median household income $16,965 Taxable sales $1,257,308 (1984 calendar year) New residential units, 1984 2009