Farewell Again to a Vanished Neighborhood

There will never again be a neighborhood in Ventura called Tortilla Flats. No developer would consider such a name. It’s so earthy, so ethnic, so--well, so not-the-demographic-we’re-aiming-for. Tortilla Flats does not have the moneyed ring of, say, Royal Pheasant Crescent Heights--but it was an honest-to-God neighborhood, and now that it’s long gone, nobody is quite sure what to do with its most tangible memories.

In the early 1950s, Tortilla Flats was burned off and bulldozed to make room for the Ventura Freeway. The weekend after next, a tribute to the neighborhood--a colorful, 500-foot-long plywood mural on Figueroa Street across from the county fairgrounds--may be dismantled and its many panels parceled out to interested parties.

The mural was painted and mounted on a concrete wall in 1995. A legion of community volunteers pitched in on the memorial to the Flats--a place where tough times bound a multiracial mix of field workers, shopkeepers and Dust Bowl refugees.

You would expect the people behind this extraordinary work to be sputtering with outrage at the prospect of its deconstruction. In fact, they’re the ones who came up with the idea. For them, it couldn’t happen soon enough. The problem is, others insist on trying to keep the massive piece more or less whole, a permanent reminder of a vanished time.

Moses Mora, who organized the project with artist M.B. Hanrahan, feels a bit of anguish whenever he goes by the mural. He sees the peeling paint, the cracks, the fading colors, the rawness that just four years of salt air and sea winds can work on wood.

“I was pushing for it to be taken down in June or July but I got talked out of it,” he said. “The idea was to keep it up for just one more fair, to let hundreds of thousands of people see it one more time.”

A soft-spoken man who sports a pony tail, Mora grew up in Tortilla Flats. He remembers the neighborhood’s brutal end, and he wants his homage to it to pass on gracefully, before the next rainy season strips away yet more detail.

That’s why he held a meeting Wednesday night. The mural’s supporters--volunteers, donors and members of families that once lived in Tortilla Flats--were summoned. The air was subdued, and the discussion grimly practical: We’ll need an air compressor for pneumatic tools. We’ll need experienced construction workers who know their way around cement nails.

Mora said he received plenty of calls from people eager to claim the mural’s 4-by-8-foot panels. A baseball museum wanted one showing a pitcher from the defunct Ventura Oilers hurling a ball through the fog of Seaside Park. Many of the three dozen people at the meeting had their own favorites--panels showing the family store, or the fabulous old Green Mill Ballroom, or the monarch butterflies fluttering along the Ventura River, or the produce truck spilling its load (to the delight of neighborhood kids) at the treacherous roadside spot nicknamed “Saladbowl Curve.”

They came wanting a panel or two for their shops or garages or backyards--a souvenir, a memory. But that’s not how they left.

Mark Capelli, who grew up a couple of blocks from Tortilla Flats, made an eloquent pitch for history.

“These paintings are more valuable than some of you might think,” he said.

They reflect the community’s richness. In a generation or two, there won’t be old-timers old enough to remember Tortilla Flats. All that will be left will be photo albums here and there--and these powerful, humorous, poignant, quirky, fading panels.

“They’re genuine,” Capelli said. “They’re a genuine expression of a period in the community’s history.”

Capelli suggested the mural be taken down and stored to protect it. Meanwhile, a group of advocates would make the dreary rounds of calls to arts agencies, foundations, corporate donors and the like. Restoration techniques would be investigated; local sites--indoor and outdoor--would be explored.

Money can be found, he insisted. Would a community sit back and allow the murals of Diego Rivera to be erased? And simply documenting the Tortilla Flats mural wouldn’t be enough, he said: “I’d be bummed out if we just had the Sistine Chapel on video, and not the Sistine Chapel itself.”

What, then, will become of Tortilla Flats? It’s no Sistine Chapel, but in a land where subdivisions have replaced neighborhoods and history is measured more in decades than centuries, it clearly has a place in people’s hearts.

Another meeting will be held at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Pierpont Inn.

Mora still hopes to disassemble the mural on the weekend of Sept. 10. He’s open to new ideas, but he’s skeptical about the prospect of cash raining down.

“Artists in Ventura are pretty much left to hustle their own paint,” he said.

And some of the panels are too far gone for even the most tender revival efforts, he said: “To save them, we’d have to start over.”

Others connected with the mural from its inception think that--like the Tortilla Flats neighborhood, it’s had its day.

“It’s like having an old dog,” said Suzanne Lawrence, who has chronicled the mural’s development and transcribed oral histories of Tortilla Flats residents. “At what point do you stop having surgery and let the old guy go?”

Besides, she said, muralists are fatalists. “Their work is transitory,” she said. “It’s supposed to be transitory. In a week, people will come to the realization that this is more complicated than they thought, that they don’t have the time to take this on. Then we’ll distribute the panels to the people who want them.”

Maybe.

Or maybe an organization like the Ventura County Museum of History and Art will offer to take in the homeless panels. Or maybe the city will find an appropriate park for them, and enough dollars to protect them. Or maybe . . .

Who knows? Tortilla Flats is beaten up, but it’s not history yet.

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or by e-mail at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.