Good View, or in Spanish Buena Vista, is the name of a short segment of road that curves around the northern edge of Mt. Rubidoux, connecting Seventh Street (now Mission Inn Avenue) to Mission Boulevard across the Santa Ana River in Jurupa Valley. No one seems to know why this segment was named Buena Vista Avenue (sometimes referred to as Drive). Was it for the good view of Mt. Rubidoux on one side and Little Rubidoux on the other? Or was it the view as travelers crossed the Santa Ana River and entered Riverside? Buena Vista begins at the end of Seventh Street, near today’s Afron Way (Rose Way on early maps), and extends to the river.
As Frank Miller, part of the Huntington Park Association, developed Mt. Rubidoux, he hired Hiram Chittenden of the Army Corps of Engineers to design a road up and down the mountain for tourists. As travelers left the Mission Inn and drove up Seventh Street, they had to connect to the road, Huntington Drive, that was being built. They did this via an incline at the end of Seventh Street, which bent to the left and crossed over Buena Vista Avenue. The bridge over the road was designed by Arthur Benton, architect of the Mission Inn. His original plans called for only the roadway, but he revised them to include a pedestrian walkway on one side.
As the road was built beginning in mid-1906 on the mountain, rocks blasted away were used to line the sides of the road as a guard wall and to construct the bridge over Buena Vista Avenue. Gunnar Kjellburg, the foreman for much of the roadwork, was an interesting early Riversider (a subject for a follow-up article). A newspaper of the day reported that the bridge was to be named Loring Bridge, as it connected Loring’s property on the north side of Buena Vista Avenue to the base of Mt. Rubidoux. However, that name never caught on, and instead the bridge became known as the Buena Vista Bridge.
The early bridge provided a narrow two-lane road on Seventh Street/Buena Vista Avenue and featured a pedestrian path via an arched tunnel on the south side, located at the base of Mt. Rubidoux.
This early Buena Vista Bridge served Riverside for about 25 years. By 1930, the state highway department determined that the 1923-built bridge spanning the Santa Ana River was no longer adequate to handle the traffic, and a new four-lane bridge would be constructed. One source stated that the daily average number of vehicles was 5,948…