Museum of Riverside

NHL Harada House Neighborhood Vision Plan Block Party

Event Date: Sunday, February 22, 2015, Noon - 3:00 pm

Join us for the National Historic Landmark Harada House Neighborhood Vision Plan Block Party. This will be a great opportunity for community members, neighbors, and the Heritage Square Historic District to learn more about the National Historic Landmark Harada House and what its story means to Riverside. The event is free and open to the public. The Riverside Metropolitan Museum, in partnership with the City of Riverside’s Historic Preservation Office, recently received a grant from the California Fund of the National Trust for Historic Preservation to engage the community in creating a Neighborhood Vision Plan for Riverside’s Harada House and the Harada House Interpretive Center(Robinson House). As a kick-off event, we are hosting a Block Party on February 22nd from 12-3pm on Lemon Street between 3rd and 4th Streets to inform interested community members about opportunities to get involved with this project. Attendees will learn about the Haradas’ story and three ways to get involved: 1) volunteer as guides in “Reading the Sites: The Japanese American Community in Riverside” tour 2) develop and participate in an ambassadors program to spread the word about the Harada House 3) develop a Neighborhood Watch program within the Harada House neighborhood. Following the Block Party, a series of forums, online resources, and community kits will facilitate discussion leading to the creation of a neighborhood vision plan.

The Harada House is among the most significant and powerful civil rights landmarks in California. The house, located at 3356 Lemon Street, was purchased by Japanese-born Jukichi Harada in the names of his American born children, successfully challenging the Alien Land Law, which prohibited non-citizens from owning land in California. Despite legal action pursued by neighbors, the Haradas were allowed to keep the house, thus providing a major victory not only for the Haradas, but for civil rights. However, the story did not end there—during WWII, the Haradas were forced to leave their home and move to incarceration camps. Unlike many other Japanese American families, the Haradas did not lose their home, and Jukichi’s daughter Sumi later returned to the house in 1945, living there the rest of her life. The family donated the house and its contents to the Riverside Metropolitan Museum in 2004, and since then the RMM has worked carefully preserve this site as a tool to tell a powerful and inspirational story of a Riverside family’s pursuit of social justice and the American Dream.


This project has been funded in part by a grant from the California Fund of the National Trust for Historic Preservation