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RB: What was Philadelphia like at that time, and also the neighborhood in particular?

LR: It was, I remember being sort of working class, African American community mostly. I remember those big old houses on, was that Parkside, Avenue, and they were just grand old places. I just remember sort of like walking around the neighborhood and just going, "Wow." Philadelphia was going through some, like most urban centers, was going through a lot of blight, there was a lot of poverty and the effects of racism and discrimination and redlining. So the neighborhoods were very, very segregated, so I remember that came into play at the Japanese House and Garden sometimes, too. I remember there were loads of kids who would sort of be very curious about the house from the neighborhood, and they would kind of sneak through the fences and gather around the house, and sometimes they could be destructive. And I remember there was another young woman, she was also biracial like me. I remember her name being Rachael, I don't remember her last name. And she and I got together and we said, what's the best way to deal with it? Because you were talking about the relationship with the city, the city did nothing. They had one security guy who secured the whole area, and he was terrible. He could care less. And so we were like, "What are we gonna do?" She said, "Why don't we go talk to them?" Let's just talk to them. So we would go out, and when we saw the kids climbing over trying to catch the fish in the pond, they put their hands in, they said, "Hey, stop." And we'd say, "Hey, let me tell you a little bit about the fish and why they're important, why you should not try to take them out of the water." And then we would have conversations with them and then maybe they would come back and we would see them, instead of chasing them away, we started trying to just take them around informally with the hope that they would tell their friends, "Hey, this was a real special kind of place." And so that was our goal, was to let the neighborhood kids see it was kind of special. Because it was kind of understandable, their curiosity, it was a beautiful place. And so I sort of remembered, that was one of the things that I felt the best about, was sort of like that relationship with some of the neighborhood kids who'd come back. I remember one time, one kid brought his family. [Laughs] He brought his family and we just took the family around and we let them come in for free and just sort of looked around the place. I remember feeling really good about that. Yeah, but at the same time, it was also, there was vandalism and I remember at least two instances of vandalism similar to what... I don't remember the exact years, but I remember at least two times when the place was vandalized. And one involved some sort of fire.

RB: The audience at this time, would you say it was a good mix of the demographics of Philadelphia that was actually coming to the House?

LR: I'm not sure. Yes, actually, yes. They had these trolleys that would go to all the historic houses. And it was not a trolley but it was like a bus that was done up to look like a trolley. And they would do these tours through all the houses, and the Japanese House and Garden was probably the most popular one, so you'd get a lot of people, a lot of out of towners, a lot of folks from different countries, a lot of folks from different parts of Philadelphia as well. So, yes, you got a lot of different kinds of folks coming through. You've got a lot of students, you had a lot of the art schools would come through as well, because they might be doing a unit on Japanese architecture, things like that. So yeah, there was a lot of different kinds of, lot of different kinds of folks coming through. And I remember a lot of tourists coming, international tourists, actually, lot of Europeans would come through, and there were a lot of Japanese folks who would come through as well.

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