MURAL DEPICTING LEMON GROVE HISTORY REINSTALLED AFTER BEING REMOVED TO PROTECT THEM

By: Jessyka Heredia

August 14, 2023 (Lemon Grove) -- There is a new bistro coming to Lemon Grove in what was formerly the Lemon Grove Bakery. Located at 3308 Main Street, the building has a long history that has  been the center of town ever since and Lemon Grove Bistro will be the next business to keep this historical building alive.

The Lemon Grove Bistro is set to open its doors sometime in late summer or early fall. Owners of the bistro, Frederik and Katherine Selchau, were required to put in a sidewalk as part of the city’s permitting process so the historical murals on the south side of the building were partially removed and stored while the construction of the sidewalk was underway as a protective measure.

The murals were reinstalled on July 22^nd by the Lemon Grove Historical Society after the sidewalk was complete.

Helen Ofield, former Lemon Grove Historical Society president, was kind enough to share the history of these murals and the long history of Lemon Grove that the artist has captured in these paintings.

Ofield shared that “The award-winning Lemon Grove History Mural, painted by Katy Strzelecki and Janne LaValle between2005 and 2013, depicts the story of Lemon Grove in an epic five-sections measuring 65 feet long by 18 feet high, including: The World of the Kumeyaay Nation; The Spanish Conquest; The Mexican Empire; The Birth of Lemon Grove; and Modern Lemon Grove.”

Ofield explained that the murals have a running theme in the five murals where “the fate of the Kumeyaay, culminating in Section Five. Upper left portrait of Jane Dumas, a long-time Lemon Grove resident and a noted Kumeyaay healer, who came to the Parsonage Museum in 2005 to bless the Lemon Grove Historical Society's plans to install interior museum murals about the Kumeyaay and to commission a large outdoor mural depicting five major periods in Lemon Grove's history, with special emphasis on our Native American forebears.”

One of the most well-known parts of Lemon Grove’s history is the very first school segregation case heard in the US. Ofield points out that “on the upper right of Modern Lemon Grove is a portrait of Don Roberto Alvarez, Sr., who, at age 12, represented a cohort of some75 pupils who had been shut out of the Lemon Grove Grammar School in 1931 and required to attend a segregated school for Mexican American pupils. Two months later, this move by (alas) the local School Board was defeated in San Diego Superior Court on Mar. 11,1931.”

Ofield added “Many generous area people and companies made the above possible.” Ofield was the “the instigator of the mural and renaming projects and says she “is grateful to them and to the successive boards of the Society for their unwavering faith in the power of history and its many lessons. An example is the stellar work of the current president, Laura Hook.”