Riverside Ca

The air above the TXI Riverside Cement Plant was blinding white Tuesday, blocking out the blue sky. For as long as Mary Alfonso, 79, can remember, dust from the factory has been a feature of life on "the Hill" just above it. When she and her husband moved to the neighborhood near the border of Riverside and San Bernardino counties 52 years ago, they joked about its uniqueness because all the roofs were white. "Then my car turned white -- and it started out green!" said Alfonso.

Those who have never seen Riverside may picture it in the language of L.A. drive-time radio: Triple-digit heat. Foreclosures. Traffic. But unlike some cities on the coast, its 312,000 residents started long ago to transform their downtown rather than dismantle it. Downtown's Mission Inn Avenue speaks to their powers of imagination. The gracious former YWCA, designed by Hearst Castle architect Julia Morgan, is now the Riverside Art Museum.

When the citrus industry transformed Riverside into a prosperous hub in the early 1900s, it was dubbed California's second gold rush, and that bright spirit shows in the city's eye-popping annual Festival of Lights. The Mission Inn Hotel and Spa (3649 Mission Inn Ave, [951] 784-0300; www.missioninn.com), a historic landmark that occupies an entire city block, is the centerpiece of the festival, adorned with 3.

Riverside County sheriff's deputies shot and killed a suspected drunk driver late Tuesday as he allegedly accelerated toward them after a brief chase, authorities said. Deputies tried to stop the man about 11:20 p.m. after he drove onto a curb and ran a red light and a stop sign in Home Gardens, an unincorporated community near Corona, according to sheriff's investigator Jerry Franchville.

The 16-year-old driver who crashed his parents' car into a Riverside light pole, killing a 14-year-old passenger in what police said was an impromptu street race Sunday night, has been charged with one count of vehicular manslaughter and three counts of felony street racing causing injury. Police said the unlicensed driver had seven passengers in the car as he raced another car at 100 mph into oncoming traffic on Tyler Street.

Police arrested two men and two women Thursday on suspicion of murder in the death of a man who was beaten with an angle-iron bar and wooden sticks just before 2 a.m. near a gas station at Tyler Street and Arlington Avenue. Police said the unidentified victim had spoken with two women earlier in the night and then got into a fight with two men on Gould Street.

The preschoolers piled on stage, girls wearing poodle skirts made of paper and wiggling their hips while the boys adjusted their sunglasses. The performance was part of Wednesday's festivities at Sunshine Early Childhood Center, a preschool for special needs children in Riverside that is celebrating 60 years in the community. When Sunshine opened in 1947, it had 12 pupils. The public school now serves 250 children ages 3 to 5 in the Riverside Unified School District.

Invest in a little down time for yourself with a spring spa package at Riverside's historic Mission Inn Hotel & Spa. The deal: The Inn's Spring Forward package costs $220 a night and includes accommodations, overnight valet parking, $50 credit for dining at one of the four Mission Inn restaurants and a $50 Kelly's Spa gift card, which can be used for any spa treatment or retail purchase. The package runs through June 1.

In a victory for the disabled rights movement, a federal judge Wednesday ordered Riverside to pay a wheelchair-bound man $221,000 damages and to fix 189 curb ramps within four months. The award is the largest in a state case involving disabled access. U.S. District Judge Stephen G. Larson granted the award to John Lonberg, 69, who has battled the city for almost two decades to improve hundreds of curbs, sidewalks and driveways. "It couldn't get much better than this," Lonberg said.

Twenty-five years ago this month, Jackson Daniels shot and killed two Riverside police officers who had come to arrest him. Daniels, a career criminal, had two years earlier been shot and left paralyzed as he tried to flee a bank robbery. While his court case was pending, Daniels was recovering at a friend's house and kept a gun near his bed, apparently waiting for police to come for him.