![]() In its heyday, the ballroom, near the intersection of Julian and Main streets, hosted such legends as Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino. When they really wanted to kick up dust, residents went to the popular Green Mill Ballroom to dance. Key neighborhood touchstones included Bennie’s Market (at Meta and Ventura Avenue) and Feraud’s grocery store and bakery (at Main Street and the Avenue). “It was harder but more simple, if that makes any sense,” said Palazuelos, a member of a Tortilla Flats legacy and reunion committee that strives to keep the neighborhood’s memory alive. Life had its own peculiar vibe in Tortilla Flats. The infamous “Salad Bowl Curve,” where Garden Street turned onto Meta Street (now Thompson Boulevard), helped supply the neighborhood with produce in its own truck-tipping way. Some raised chickens and tended gardens in what passed for backyards. Many fished for Quijada’s prized steelhead and others hunted quail, rabbit and deer. It was a place where old flour sacks doubled for undergarments and towels people often borrowed clothes to go to prom or other special events. Roads in Tortilla Flats were unpaved and there were no streetlights, the exhibit notes. The people were chiefly Latino and mostly low income. “It was a big mix of people,” said Toni Palazuelos, whose mom and aunts grew up in Tortilla Flats. Tortilla Flats was a melting pot of Chumash, Latinos and other mixed Spanish races who came here in the 1910s as they fled the Mexican Revolution, impoverished white “Okies” who escaped the Dust Bowl that choked the southern prairies in the 1930s, Asians and, later, a small but vibrant African American community. “It resonates with people because it is such a universal story,” said Mora, who was born there. It roared in the 1920s of Quijada’s youth, weathered two big wars and the Great Depression, and then fell victim to a freeway. In many ways, the story of Tortilla Flats mirrors how America grew up and was shaped by events in the first half (or so) of the 1900s. It stands as a shrine to an old way of life, and as a kudo of sorts for two Ventura artists, MB Hanrahan and Moses Mora, who planted the exhibit seed idea with the museum and - with the help of old residents - kept alive Tortilla Flats’ spirit and identity in later years via a couple of historical murals. Titled “Last Exit: Tortilla Flats,” the small but deftly rendered and detailed display continues through Nov. Quijada’s story is part of the fabric that binds an exhibit at the Museum of Ventura County in Ventura that examines the color and flavor - and ultimate demise - of Tortilla Flats. They’re all gone now there’s only a few of us left.” Everyone knew each other and helped each other out. “We were poor, in a way,” Quijada, now 92 and living in Oxnard, said, “but we were not poor in friendships. It was a tough, hardscrabble place - but also one, he said, full of heart and soul. He remembered the hobos who hung out at the nearby railroad tracks. He learned to swim in the nearby Ventura River, and fished for steelhead there all the way upstream to Foster Park. An ample measure of pride filled Frank “Barney” Quijada’s voice as he recalled the place where he grew up, the poor Tortilla Flats neighborhood in west Ventura that all but vanished years ago in a bow to what some term modern progress.
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