Linda Esperanza Marquez High School

Linda Esperanza Marquez High School is a public choice high school in Huntington Park, California that is part of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Marquez High School opened in 2013 as part of LA Unified's $19.5 billion New School Construction and Modernization Program. The school is a Choice site that offers the LIBRA Academy, The Huntington Park Institute of Applied Medicine, and the School of Social Justice.The campus was designed by Ehrlich Architects on a 14-acre industrial site, near a freight rail tunnel and a sawmill. Ehrlich first presented the design in 2005, and construction lasted seven years. The Huntington Park community had initially expressed a preference for a Mediterranean style building similar to the city hall building, but the contemporary design was ultimately approved after community review. Designed for 1,620 students, the facility includes a classroom building with separate floors for each of the three schools, with shared facilities around the other sides, all connected by an "internal pedestrian street". The athletic facilities and library are designed to provide community access when not in use by the school.The site of the school was previously used as a storage yard for used tires, then became a building materials recycling facility that drew community opposition, especially after it was used to store some 600,000 tons of concrete ruins from a portion of the Santa Monica Freeway that collapsed in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Linda Esperanza Marquez, for whom the school is named, is a community activist who fought to have the site cleared and reused.