Marguerita Ave

With an ever-present curiosity, I took a casual glance at the 1938 Riverside map, which dated from ten years before the State bought the 74.2-acre harvest field for the second California School for the Deaf site.

The 1938 Thomas Brothers map depicts the city of Riverside with street names. The street names near CSDR are found here. The State closed escrow on the new school site in May 1948.

While looking at the old map, I naturally looked for Horace Street first. I was mildly surprised that the unpaved dirt road was already named Horace Street on the map. I was also surprised to see several other unpaved streets nearby on the map.

As can be seen on the old map, paved Arlington Ave is at the top, along with smaller streets, all of which were dirt paths. There is no indication of CSDR here, ten years before CSDR founder Perry Seely chose the present site for a new school in 1948.

Examples include Lincoln Ave, Maude Street, Jane Street, Mary Ave and Washington Street. Other newer nearby streets, such as Gertrude St, David St, Ronald St and Priscilla St, were not yet on the map. These newer streets were later bulldozed for a new housing subdivision around 1951.

This black map printed in 1953 indicates CSDR at its current site.

The nearby unpaved streets shown on the 1938 map were already familiar to me, but I readily admit that I overlooked one thing when I examined the map a couple years ago. I learned that Marguerita Ave used to be a dirt path from Mary Ave to Victoria Ave through the CSDR site.

Marguerita Ave ends at the school perimeter on Maude Street, ending the through route toward Victoria Ave. The trees in the background sit on the school property.

As the new owner of the CSDR site, the State closed Marguerita Ave at Maude Street, preventing its use as a through street to Victoria Ave. This closure forces drivers to detour to Lincoln Ave to get to Victoria Ave. This detour is still in place today.

At left is a Lassen Cottage, where drivers used to be able to drive through toward Victoria Ave. The unpaved Marguerita Ave here was closed to through traffic in August 1951.

In 1996, retired CSDR vocational teacher Burt Schmidt (now deceased) shared with the author his memory of driving along dirt paths on Horace St, Lincoln Ave, Maude St and other nearby dirt roads in 1948.

Burton Schmidt was a longtime teacher at CSDR from 1968 to 2005. Burton moved to Riverside in 1947 with a BA from Gallaudet to work at Riverside’s newspaper plant, where he worked with Perry Seely. He and his wife, Ailene, drove over in 1948 to see where the future CSDR would be built on the Horace Street farmland. He had no idea that he would end up teaching printing at CSDR 20 years later and would teach there for almost 40 years.

We have one more long-lost story to add to CSDR history. I will continue to keep an eye open for other hidden gems waiting to be discovered.

The Kund Walkway with Queen palm trees between the Seely Center and the Social Hall used to be a dirt path for a drive on Marguerite Ave dating back to the 1920s. Groundbreaking for a new school occurred in August 1951 closing the dirt road.

Since 1995, I have had the pleasure of conducting research to uncover the long-lost historical gems. The high point of my 31-year research work occurred when I accidentally came upon Perry E Seely in 1995 as the de facto school founder of CSDR.

Kevin Struxness, ’76, MA

Editor, CSDR Old Times

25 October 2026