Richmond History
The new mobile app, Rooted in Richmond, created by Richmond’s Historic Preservation Commission, invites visitors on a self-guided walking tour of the city’s past, including some of the city's oldest neighborhoods and historic locations. The tour provides a glimpse of the past in a way few have experienced.
The walking tour begins at the site of the former Flora Ninomiya Japanese nursery, guiding the user through the city's early years with coordinated stops at key locations linked to Richmond's history. The tour allows the user to walk in the footsteps of train porters and other Pullman employees who settled on Richmond's south side, making their homes close to their work in the Pullman shops just a short walk away.
As the narrative continues, it guides the user through the location of recently discovered vintage art, long forgotten in the basement of Richmond's first post office. The narrative details the painstaking restoration process before proceeding through the fabulous public art displays of the Pullman neighborhood.
Next, the app takes the user through the evolution of transportation in the city, including a trek through the Nystrom neighborhood, a residential area located near the historic Kaiser Shipyard site. During World War II, this neighborhood housed many shipyard workers and their families, and offered elementary schools with differential starting times to accommodate shipyard employees working a variety of shifts.
According to Historic Preservation Commissioner Jonathan Haeber, "the tour covers 16 locations over six miles and includes maps, photos, videos, and three-dimensional renderings of historic objects, and more. Topics range from sacred Ohlone shell mound to the formation of environmental justice groups in the wake of a toxic industrial accident."
Commission Chair Joann Pavlinec said that producing the walking tour app was a labor of love for the Historic Preservation Commissioners and also offered them a rich learning experience.
"Serving on Richmond's Historic Preservation Commission leads to a lot of information on the city's historic culture. However, doing outreach to neighborhood groups and institutions for this project led me to resources and people with first-hand accounts, significantly enriching the basic stories I knew with many discoveries," Pavlinec said. "This tour offers these first-hand stories, along with others that all the Commissioners worked on, with images to transport you there while you're biking or walking the very location where they occurred, many with the original structures still there to enhance the experience."
The Rooted in Richmond app is available for free in all app stores and online.
Editor's note: In April of 2023, the Rooted in Richmond app won a California Preservation Design Award for Cultural Heritage, Intangible Assets. Award recipients are selected by a jury of top professionals in the fields of architecture, engineering, planning, and history, as well as renowned architecture critics and journalists.
Rooted In Richmond
Hundreds of years of Richmond, California history, in the palm of your hands. Hear the stories of the people and places of Richmond through exclusive audio interviews, 3D models of Richmond’s historical artifacts, and dozens of vivid historical images. This tour will automatically trigger as you…
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