Photos by Eric Parsons / Star staff Salvador Cortez, right, helps lift a painted panel to Brian Edwards, a carpenter with Timothy J. Ferrie general engineering company, as they install the Tortilla Flats mural along Figueroa Street in Ventura on Tuesday.

Completion of the mural installation is slated for around May 6. Featuring large painted panels and photo tiles depicting daily life in the old Tortilla Flats neighborhood, the project will be dedicated May 31.

Eric Parsons / Star staff. Ventura 4/22/08. Johnny Barrios, left, greets Moses Mora after Barrios stopped by to check on the progress of the new Tortilla Flats mural on Figueroa Street beneath U.S. Highway 101 on Tuesday. Mora is the project's coordinator, while Barrios is the subject of one of the mural's paintings, center. The painting depicts an old photograph of Barrios from 1952 when he was a successful rodeo rider. Barrios and his horse, Shorty T, were victorious in a horse-versus-man duel with Olympic champion sprinter Jesse Owens at the fairgrounds. Barrios now owns Tony's Pizzaria at the corner of Figueroa Street and Thompson Boulevard.

The story is Ventura legend. On a cool, fog-encased day in 1952, Johnny Barrios and his quarter horse, Shorty T, were pitted in a stirring duel against Olympic champion sprinter Jesse Owens at the Ventura County Fairgrounds.

Shorty T burst off the line. Owens, winner of four gold medals in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, pulled up short with cramps.

"He said the fog hampered his ability," Barrios, a former rodeo cowboy, recalled with glee Wednesday from inside his pizza shack, Tony's Pizzaria, his hands covered in flour. "It wouldn't have mattered. That horse was a bullet."

Nearly 60 years later, that historic race, including images of Owens and Barrios atop Shorty T, are depicted among dozens of handcrafted murals being installed this week on the Figueroa Street underpass in honor of a long-gone Ventura neighborhood, Tortilla Flats.

Often referred to as Ventura's first neighborhood, Tortilla Flats was a working-class community of diverse cultures and Dust Bowl families that was razed with the arrival of Highway 101 in the 1940s and '50s.

To the artist team of Moses Mora and MB Hanrahan, the murals memorialize some of Ventura's often overlooked but important residents — the largely poor working class whose neighborhood was steamrolled in the name of progress.

The duo began in 1994 to collect photographs and conduct oral histories of the Chumash, Latino, Asian and African-American families displaced from their modest homes.

"We live in a very transient society," said Mora, 60, an arts advocate who was born around the corner from the installation site. "We need to educate people of our rich history, and to honor a lost neighborhood."

The mural project also will help bridge the "moat" created by the freeway, by restoring both a sense of place to an area once rich in cultural history as well as establishing a more inviting connection between Ventura's downtown and beach, said Denise Sindelar, the city's public art supervisor.

The city in 2003 awarded the artists a $36,000 contract to design, fabricate and install a mural as part of a city improvement project. Their selection was based in large part on a Tortilla Flats mural created in 1995 across from the fairgrounds that had to be dismantled five years later because of deterioration, Sindelar said.

Consisting of images derived from old photographs, oral histories and extensive interviews of residents, the new, permanent mural is a reinterpretation of the previous work. To prevent wear, the murals are painted with high-gloss acrylics on engineered plywood — the kind used on offshore oil platforms, Mora said.

The murals include a series of images depicting the Green Mill Ballroom, a funky music joint near Ventura Avenue and the Ventura River that lured the likes of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, Chuck Berry and Luis Arcaráz. Jazzman Earl Bostic had John Coltrane in his band when he played there, Mora said.

Like any project of this magnitude, there have been delays. Government officials had to approve each step. It took almost a year to get the California Department of Transportation to agree to the steel framework on which the bracketed murals are anchored.

But Hanrahan never lost sight of the vision.

"Despite the delays, I never saw it in elements," she said Wednesday from the job site as freeway traffic raced overhead. "I always saw the big picture. And amazingly, it looked pretty much like this."

Asked how many hours he's poured into the project, Mora joked, "Half my life."

Mora called it a labor of love. "We never stopped researching," he said. "We still interview people. We're still learning."

So many images were donated that the pair developed a Tortilla Flats archive.

"These people weren't rich. There were good family folks. Some were soldiers who went off to war," said Hanrahan, 49, a professional artist who praised the city for preserving the memory of a community filled with average people and living legends like Barrios.

"They were the community that helped build this town," she said. "They were special, every one of them."