On your right is one of Riverside’s boldest civic experiments: the Main Street Pedestrian Mall, a long public promenade stretching from Fifth Street to Tenth, with City Hall at one end and the convention center at the other. It opened in nineteen sixty-six, but before that, this was the city’s main shopping street, lined with the sort of stores that anchored everyday life. Sears traded here, along with Montgomery Ward, J. C. Penney, Woolworth’s, Westbrook’s, Pic ’n Save, and the S. H. Kress dime store. For decades, people came to Main Street not for a grand occasion, but for socks, school clothes, lunch, and gossip.
The mall itself grew out of local pride, and a touch of irritation. Riverside leaders had often handed major civic projects to large Los Angeles firms. An early master plan in nineteen fifty-eight came from Welton Beckett and Associates. Local architect Herman Ruhnau had had enough of that pattern. He wanted to prove Riverside talent could shape Riverside’s future. So his firm, Ruhnau, Evans and Steinmann, took over the project and unveiled a revised, smaller vision in nineteen sixty-three.
Ruhnau then brought in Garrett Eckbo, a celebrated landscape architect known for crisp, modern outdoor spaces. Eckbo gave the mall a mid-century modern character, meaning clean lines, strong geometry, and a deliberate sense of openness. His firm also designed Fresno’s Fulton Mall at nearly the same time, which is why the two spaces once looked like close cousins.
But city landscapes live hard lives. After pedestrianization, Main Street suffered the same suburban pull that weakened downtowns across America. Shops drifted away, business thinned, and Riverside changed course. Leaders anchored the mall with civic buildings instead, adding City Hall in nineteen seventy-five and the convention center in nineteen seventy-six. Then, in the nineteen nineties, the reopening of the Mission Inn brought people back, and this stretch became a cultural center rather than just a retail one.
In two thousand and eight, the city spent ten million dollars renovating the mall as part of the Riverside Renaissance. Preservationists protested because most of the original nineteen sixties landscape design disappeared in that modernization. The clearest surviving piece of Ruhnau’s first vision is the forty-five-foot clock tower fountain near City Hall at the Tenth Street end. New layers keep arriving too, including the Lock in Your Love monument, where residents fasten engraved padlocks as a public declaration of affection for the city.
Main Street still serves Riverside as its shared outdoor living room, and it remains open twenty-four hours a day. Next, head toward the California Museum of Photography, where an old storefront learned to see in a new way.
