A Neon-Accented Extravaganza of the Sights and Tastes of Home

“You ask for chicken feet and most stores say, ‘No, no, no,’ ” butcher Nato Gutierrez declares, but his gleaming meat counter in Grand Central Market is not like most stores.

Fresh chicken feet, at $1.79 a pound, are displayed alongside other hard-to-find delicacies: cabeza de puerco (pork head), cabeza de chivo (lamb head), honeycomb tripe, pork neck bone, rolled pork skin, beef feet--skinless and skin-on--and rabbit.

Those chicken feet may be ugly, Gutierrez admits, but they have a flavor you just can’t get from a drumstick.

“When I was 8 or 9 years old, I remember when my sister cried . . . my mother would give her chicken feet, like a candy. And no cry--happy,” Gutierrez says in the thick accent of his native Toluca, Mexico.

Now his wife makes soup with chicken feet, hot pepper and vegetables. “She puts in three or four drumsticks, three or four wings, liver, four or five gizzards, three or four chicken necks and the feet--four or five feet,” he says. “It’s very good.”

Economy Meats, where Gutierrez works and also shops, is hardly the only purveyor of exotic fare at the sprawling, bustling, neon-lit Grand Central Market, a fixture in downtown Los Angeles since 1917.

Spanning a city block, from Broadway to Hill Street, the cavernous indoor market is crammed with more than 40 individually run meat shops, produce stands, fast-food counters and specialty outlets.

You can buy cactus and jicama, tamarind pods and chickweed. Got the flu? Arthritis? There are healing herbs by the jar, plus chiles of every type, flowers, liquors, wristwatches, dolls and heavy boxing bags.

Cooks tend woks and big flame grills, cooking up curry dishes, chicken and duck. Carts roll down the concrete-and-sawdust aisles piled high with boxes of watermelons, onions and tomatoes. Bins of day-old bread carry rock-bottom prices: four loaves for $1, sesame buns at three packs for $1. The spinning drums and conveyor belts of the Chapalita Tortilleria churn out 12,000 fresh flour tortillas a day.

Styled after the traditional marketplaces of La Paz or Mexico City, Grand Central is a cultural cornerstone of Los Angeles’ Latino community.

Families from Spanish-speaking enclaves in Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, Pico-Union and far-flung suburbs venture downtown every day to browse the long stretch of Latino-owned stores on Broadway and to visit Grand Central Market for lunch or dinner or to buy groceries.

Nearly 70,000 people come through every week.

“For Latinos, it’s very, very important,” says Arturo Martinez, 53, who immigrated to Los Angeles from Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1970. “Many of the markets in Mexico are almost the same--not in Tijuana, but in Chihuahua, Monterey, Guadalajara.”

Immigrants are gratified to find such an ambience and, more important, bargain prices for products they often can’t find elsewhere. Generations of Latinos share warm childhood memories of roaming Grand Central and eating there or at Clifton’s Cafeteria down the street.

“That was a very big deal for us,” recalls Rudy Acuna, a professor of Chicano studies at Cal State Northridge who grew up in Boyle Heights. His childhood visits in the 1930s and ‘40s sometimes included Spanish-language movies next door at the Million Dollar Theater. “You’d walk. You’d see an awful lot of people,” he says.

The market, designed by John Parkinson, had slipped into decline in the 1980s when developer Ira Yellin hired architect Brenda Levin to refurbish it. Levin noted its significance to waves of immigrants--not just Latinos, but also Germans, Jews, Chinese and later Vietnamese and Filipinos--and set out to preserve its character rather than change it.

Part of the job involved opening up the landmark’s vaulted old skylights, which had been closed during World War II. Louvers were installed, however, to keep the light from becoming too harsh.

Levin liked the hooded, industrial-looking lights and black fans dangling from the ceiling on long poles. She made those the standard. She examined the vendor signs--some plastic-lettered, some done with fluorescent tubes, some neon--and decided she liked the neon. That became the look. From only a handful, the number of neon signs proliferated to more than 30.

They fill the dim interior with vibrant lines, rectangles, bursts of script and colorful icons: the pink scoop and yellow cone of Jose’s Ice Cream Corner, the aqua swordfish of Maria’s Fresh Seafood, the stylized orange pagoda of the China Cafe.

A yellow neon cup with white squiggles of steam hangs over the Hill Street Cafe, which sells lattes and cappuccinos at the west end, where Hill Street runs along the base of Bunker Hill. Professionals from the corporate towers above enter the market from this side, but their numbers are modest--even when the Angels Flight tram made the short trip easy.

Chandler Wood, a 24-year-old movie storyboard artist, is one of the few regulars from that world. He lives in Silver Lake and is sipping coffee with his dad, Dennis, who is visiting from Raleigh, N.C.

“Nobody comes down here from my Los Angeles--that being from here to Santa Monica,” Chandler says, exaggerating only slightly. “I love it here. I think it’s a lot more interesting than any place you could go shopping west of here.”

Chandler cites the lighting, the diversity, the lamb heads and chicken feet. Dennis marvels at all the herbs and spices.

At Jones’ Grain Mill, he can find alfalfa, bee pollen, hibiscus, birch bark, frankincense and valerian root. At Del Rey Productos Latinos, he can check out the dried fish, shrimp powder, refined sea salt, bay leaves, sweet paprika, chile arbol, chile japones, chile puya, chile chipotle seco, chile morita, chile cascabel, chile mulato and chile pasilla negro.

“I shop in a sort of trendy supermarket in Raleigh and they have five chiles--and that’s a big innovation,” he says.