It’s nice when there is lots of news about Richmond, but none of it is about homicides. Today, it’s about history.

·         An article in the New York Times ( TRAVEL / ESCAPES   | November 2, 2007, Spending the Night Under the Lighthouse Beacon on the Hudson
By DAVID G. ALLAN) features  New York lighthouse but includes Richmond’s East Brother.

·         Today’s Berkeley Daily Planet features the historic Japanese nurseries at the proposed Miraflores Housing Project.

·         Chris Treadway of the Contra Costa Times invites readers to Veteran’s Day at the Red Oak Victory and Touchable Stories at the former Shipyard 3 Cafeteria Building as well as complimenting us on the Governor's Historic Preservation Award.

·         Tonight on “Eye on the Bay” (Channel 7) at 7:00 PM, East Brother Island will be featured.

The stories are copied below:

Agency Seeks Proposals to Replace Greenhouses with Homes

By Geneviève Duboscq (11-06-07)

The Richmond Community Redevelopment Agency (RCRA) is proposing to build a new housing development called Miraflores on the site of three Japanese American nurseries that date from the early 20th century. The greenhouse roofs are visible from west Interstate 80 near the Cutting Boulevard exit.

Richmond bought the nearly 14-acre site for $7.6 million in June 2006 from the Sakai, Oishi, and Endo families, according to RCRA housing director Patrick Lynch and development program manager Natalia Lawrence, speaking in a joint interview last Friday. RCRA will establish a mix of single-family homes and rental apartments on the site.

The two other partners in the Miraflores project are nonprofit developers of affordable housing: Eden Housing and the Community Housing Development Corporation of North Richmond. They will build 80 to 90 affordable-housing rental units on four acres of the site, said Lawrence.

The city will choose a developer to build between 85 and 120 single-family homes for sale, most at market rate and at least 15 percent as affordable housing. The site will be a “parklike setting,” said Lynch, with open space, walkable areas, and the daylighting (or uncovering) of Baxter Creek, which flows partly under the site.

In late October, Richmond published a request for proposals (RFP) from developers to build the single-family homes. A pre-submittal meeting and site tour will take place on Friday, Nov. 9, at 1 p.m. in the city council chambers. Proposals are due on Dec. 19.

RCRA has met with a residents’ advisory committee and held a September meeting to get public input on the scope of the required environmental impact report (EIR). With preparation of the EIR, remediation of the site, and construction, Lynch and Lawrence estimate that the project will be complete in about 36 months.

According to Donna Graves, who wrote the historical component of the 2004 “Historic Architecture Evaluation: The Oishi, Sakai and Maida-Endo Nurseries,” the site contains “the only extant cut-flower nurseries begun by Japanese Americans before World War II in the entire Bay Area, and [is] the last remaining of Richmond’s community of Japanese American flower growers.”

Parts of the site may be eligible for placement on the National Register of Historical Places as well as the California Register of Historic Places. The city has identified the Sakai home, an adjacent water tower, and one greenhouse as structures to preserve, and plans either to keep them where they stand or to move them to new locations.

California was once home to many farms and nurseries established by Japanese, or Issei, men who immigrated to the United States around the turn of the 20th century.

A sizable Japanese American community grew up around the Bay Area, wrote Graves, as Japanese laborers who had found work with the Domoto brothers’ nursery in Oakland or laying railroad tracks in Richmond moved to the outskirts of established towns to start businesses. They bought or leased land and often used family labor to grow the carnations, chrysanthemums, and roses they would sell in San Francisco.

The Alien Land Law of 1913 and similar laws forbade “aliens ineligible to citizenship,” Chinese and Japanese aliens, from owning property. Issei nurserymen and farmers transferred ownership to their U.S.-born children, or Nisei, or into corporations formed with non-Asian U.S. citizens.

But this strategy proved no help after Japan’s Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942, authorizing the military to evacuate the 120,000 people of Japanese descent who lived on the West Coast into internment or concentration camps, often with only a few days’ notice. Most Japanese Americans complied, in the belief that this was the best way to show their loyalty.

Japanese American families scrambled to store or sell most of their belongings, usually at a loss. Nursery owners hastily made arrangements for non-Japanese friends or colleagues to lease or maintain their businesses. In North Richmond, wrote Graves, nursery owners Frederick and Carrie Aebi took care of three Japanese American families’ nurseries in their absence.

Some unscrupulous caretakers didn’t pay rent to interned owners, causing them to default on their mortgages. In Across Two Worlds: Memoirs of a Nisei Flower Grower, Yoshimi Shibata describes the caretaker’s white workers threatening him with a knife when he returned to check on his family’s property in 1944.

Some nursery families that returned to the Bay Area in 1945 and 1946, like the Adachis, found their properties vandalized, their greenhouses shattered. In Richmond, some found their homes subdivided into rental units to house the shipyard and defense workers who had caused the city’s population to grow from 23,000 before the war to more than 100,000.

Don Delcollo, president of the Contra Costa county chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League, would like the Miraflores site to contain a memorial “to not only honor the flower-growing families but also all those interned” during World War II.

Sixty-five years after the internment began, “we’re beginning to lose the vast majority of people who lived through the internment experience,” Delcollo said. He would like to see Richmond host “not just a memorial but something more on a national scale,” with the help of the National Park Service.

Richmond is home to Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park, a collection of sites throughout the city, such as a Kaiser shipyard, two child-care centers, and the Ford assembly plant, that highlight Richmond’s industrial past and commemorate the lives of ordinary Americans during the war. Including some nursery structures in the national park might just work.

Richmond Councilmember Tom Butt said in a recent interview that the National Park Service originally suggested that the nursery properties were part of the homefront story: “Richmond is rich in historic resources and properly used, these can add a lot of value.”

He gave two recent examples of historic structures that have been saved. A 104-year-old building from Point Richmond’s Santa Fe train yard was rehabilitated and reopened this week as a Mechanics Bank branch. And a private developer bought the Ford assembly plant on the waterfront, rehabilitated the property, and fully leased the space. The Ford building is the future home of the national park visitors’ center.

“All of these projects started out with a large number of naysayers, people saying, ‘That old piece of garbage? We’ve got to tear it down.’ ” Butt said. “But now they’re showplaces, they’re unique. They’re something that brings people to Richmond and adds value to the businesses that are in them and adds value to the community.”

He sees the same thing happening at the Miraflores site. “What’s there will add value and will make that development distinctive and more desirable than it would be if all that stuff was just bulldozed and forgotten.”

Historian Graves agrees: “There really needs to be a more systematic and inclusive conversation about what’s most significant here, what’s a way to tell the story that allows the housing to happen but doesn’t erase this really critical portion of the past.

“Many communities have been able to achieve that balancing act, and now that Richmond has the honor of being the only place in the United States where the homefront story is being told, it seems to me that with some energy and creativity, people could find partners and resources to assist with this.”

City of Richmond Community Redevelopment Agency

www.ci.richmond.ca.us/index.asp?nid=99

Eden Housing (non profit)

edenhousing.org

Community Housing Development Corporation of North Richmond (CHDC)

www.chdcnr.com

Donna Graves (historian), Ward Hill (architectural historian), and Woodruff Minor (architectural historian), “Historic Architecture Evaluation: The Oishi, Sakai and Maida-Endo Nurseries” (October 2004)

www.ci.richmond.ca.us/DocumentView.asp?DID=2144

Councilmember Tom Butt, EForum Newsletter:

www.tombutt.com/e-forum.htm

City of Richmond Miraflores RFP and Related Documents

www.ci.richmond.ca.us/index.asp?NID=1335

Yoshimi Shibata, Across Two Worlds: Memoirs of a Nisei Flower Grower

www.acrosstwoworlds.com

OUR NEIGHBORS: CHRIS TREADWAY

Benefit to be held on ship

Contra Costa Times

Article Launched: 11/06/2007 03:03:21 AM PST

ALONG WITH DINNER, dancing and a memorial service, the ninth annual Veterans Day Dinner and Memorial Tea aboard the SS Red Oak Victory will include the dedication of a community room on the ship and a book-signing with the author of a work about the ship.

The day, a benefit for the Red Oak's restoration, takes place from 2 to 6 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $25 each and should be reserved by Thursday by calling 510-222-9200.

The day will include a memorial service on the deck of the historic Victory Ship, dancing to the Hornet Museum Dance Band, period dance demonstrations (attire from the 1930s and '40s optional), complimentary wine and cheese, and dinner in the No. 4 hold.

The No. 4 hold will be dedicated as the Rolly Hauck Memorial Community Room, in honor of the late Hauck's three-year service as restoration manager on the Red Oak. "He was responsible for the restoration of that hold at no cost," said Lois Boyle, board president of the Richmond Museum of History, which owns the ship. "People made significant contributions to that community room, and we felt it was time to honor (Hauck)."

Tom Bottomley, who has been involved with the ship's restoration, will sign copies of his new book "SS Red Oak Victory -- The Story of a Lone Survivor." The book chronicles the history of the ship and the restoration that has taken place since 1996.

The ship, which will be closed to the general public for the event, is at 1337 Canal Blvd., Berth 6A in the Port of Richmond.

PRESERVATION AWARD: If there's any doubt that the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park is a partnership, simply look at this year's Governor's Historic Preservation Awards. Richmond's national park is one of this year's 16 recipients of the state award, and the honor is being shared by the National Park Service, city of Richmond, Contra Costa County, Richmond Museum of History and the Rosie the Riveter Trust.

"This project is unique in that the National Park Service owns no property and must rely on local partners to restore and maintain dozens of historic structures and a ship," the award announcement states. "This award recognizes the success of those local partners."

In particular, the city is commended for completing the $40 million Ford Assembly Building rehabilitation project and building a memorial and four waterfront parks. The Rosie the Riveter Trust was cited for fundraising toward restoration of the historic Maritime Child Development Center.

The state Office of Historic Preservation award program, established in 1986, "emphasizes involvement by community groups and recognizes a broad array of preservation activities, from building rehabilitation, to archaeology, to interpretation, to preservation planning."

Have a community item or a tip? Call Chris Treadway at 510-262-2784, e-mail ctreadway@bayareanewsgroup.com or write to West County Times, 4301 Lakeside Drive, Richmond, CA 94806. Our fax is 510-262-2776

WHERE WE LIVE

Exhibit explores city's history

By Chris Treadway

STAFF WRITER

Article Launched: 11/06/2007 03:03:18 AM PST

Oral histories, art and the high- and low-tech worlds meld to create a kind of "virtual Richmond" in the interactive Touchable Stories exhibit that returns Friday with all-new displays on overlooked or underpublicized aspects of the city.

The first Touchable Stories show, "Richmond: An Introduction," attracted sold-out audiences in the spring and garnered enough feedback that the new show was formulated, said Shannon Flattery, artistic director and founder of the nonprofit program. This is the sixth in a series of community portraits done by Boston-based Touchable Stories and the first to take another look at the same city.

"We asked the audiences what stories need to be told. We got what we really thought were so many great ideas that we did something about it," said Flattery, who has led earlier installations in Boston and other cities. "We've never done that before."

The new show will give visitors an intimate, hands-on and nontraditional look at history and current events, using the many parts to give a sense of the whole.

"Everything you hear in the exhibit comes from community stories," Flattery said.

New exhibits look at American Indian history, nightlife that once thrived in North Richmond and the "History & Heroes of Richmond's Shoreline."

The new show also takes longer looks at three themes from the spring show: Richmond's Toxic Legacy, Latino History/Pride and the Tent City Peace Movement.

"We changed the whole exhibit," Flattery said.

"Nothing is the same."

What is the same is the nature of the program, which is more of an audience participatory show than a static exhibit.

"We have people showing up thinking this is a museum and they can just come in and see it," Flattery said. "We tell them 'No, you have to make a reservation.'"

Touchable Stories is conducted more like a Halloween haunted house attraction, with groups of 15 people exploring one of the 10 themed rooms at the former Kaiser shipyard cafeteria at the Port of Richmond until a curtain opens to send them to the next room.

Putting the stories in a provocative format that draws visitors into the subject are artists Andres Cisneros-Galindo, Ellen Gailing and Linda Roberts with James Gayles, Timothy Mason, London Parker-McWhorter, Fletcher Oaks, Amy Seidule, Ed Tannenbaum, Kathryn Zaloga and the third-grade class at Ford Elementary School.

Richmond's story is rich and complex, said Flattery, who said she hopes to establish Touchable Stories as an ongoing program here.

"I could do this for 20 years and not get close," she said of the city's story.

Reach Chris Treadway at 510-262-2784 or ctreadway@ bayareanewsgroup.com.

if you go

The multimedia oral history program "Touchable Stories: Richmond -- The Story Continues" opens Friday and runs through Dec. 15. Shows are at 8 p.m. Fridays and 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. Saturdays at 1303 Canal Blvd. in Richmond. Reservations are required and shows are limited to 15 people per tour. For reservations, call 510-619-3675. For details on the program, visit http://www.touchablestories.org