SAN BERNARDINO SUN - Driving west Friday morning on Riverside’s Arlington Avenue, I see the two-story boxy shape, a peak at the top, from a block away.
Momentarily I think it’s a church. Then I recognize what I’m seeing. It’s not a church, but in a sense it’s still holy ground.
California’s citrus industry started with two young trees, formally Washington navel oranges, shipped to Riverside in 1873 by an agriculture official in Washington, D.C., as an experiment to see if the trees from Brazil would grow here. Did they ever.
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How many oranges are there?
“About 2,000,” Benitez estimates. Sohrab Bodaghi, UC Riverside associate research scientist, does a rough count and confirms it.