Grand Central Market. Photo copyright 2016 by Anna Boudinot.

Pop Quiz: Which Los Angeles landmark is made up of has over fifty vendors, has been in continuous operation for almost 100 years, and may be a symbol of a societal issue?

The answer is Grand Central Market, which has stood at the corner of Third and Broadway since 1917. Inside you'll find food vendors as varied as Angelenos who have been making a simple living selling fruits and vegetables long before “organic” was a thing, and Brooklyn-born entrepreneurs who pride themselves on their “produce-driven, untraditional” falafel. This convergence of the old and the new, the grizzled and the young, paints a quaint picture but also creates ethical and societal concerns.

Grand Central Market. Photo copyright 2019 by Anna Boudinot

“At once a giant food court, a disassembled grocery store and an enduring civic paradigm,” Grand Central Market initially opened as a one-stop-grocery-shopping destination for downtown Los Angeles residents. Each vendor had their own specialty, whether it be meat, bread, produce, and so on, and one could travel from stand to stand to buy all the groceries in one trip. Now that downtown LA is in the midst of a “resurgence,” Grand Central Market is catering to a new generation of visitors. Under the same glow of the iconic neon signs, the market’s purveyors have morphed from grocers to restauranteurs. Wandering along, you will find ice cream, kebabs, currywurst, pupusas, ramen, deli sandwiches, small-batch coffee, and pressed juice vying for your gustatory attention. The last time I was there I enjoyed some piping hot paella and a reasonably-priced glass of sauvignon blanc. One of my companions bought a slice of pizza that had been baked in an on-site wood-fired oven, and another companion found far simpler pleasure in a fresh coconut punctured by a straw. The variety of food is matched only by the variety of people strolling through, and the ingredients of both have changed.

Lots of people used to live in downtown Los Angeles. Lots. In 1920 over half the city's population of 577,000 lived downtown, whereas today only about 50,000 Angelenos (roughly 1.25% of the population) call downtown home. Europeans operated most of the stalls at Grand Central Market until the 1970s, when Asian and Latino vendors began to dominate. In the 1980s the Market was known as a place where low-income families could buy affordable food and imported specialty goods and where “Westside ladies, their purses carefully bandoleered across their chests, gasp[ed] at the sight of Japanese eggplants for 50 cents a pound.” These days, cheap eggplant is a little harder to come by.

A 2014 short film titled The Gentrification of the People's Market compared two of the vendors operating at the Market today: a family who has sold mole since the 1970s and a family who opened a cheese store in 2013. Though the film doesn't demonize anyone, it's hard not to sympathize with the Latino family who is worried about the future of their business and roll your eyes at the white man in his 30s who could clearly relocate his cheese store to Silver Lake if he had to.

Perhaps the most emblematic of the Market's new generation of vendors is the egg sandwich shop called Eggslut. First a popular food truck, it made headlines when it opened a brick-and-mortar location in Grand Central Market in 2013, selling out a four-day food supply in its opening day. Few things represent white privilege better than a restaurant with a slur in its name, a $15 egg sandwich on its menu, and a line around the block.

Gentrification is defined in the film as the immigration of middle-class residents into a working-class neighborhood, whereby the newer residents start changing elements of the built environment. This results in rents going up, which results in displacement of the working-class residents. (For an in-depth look at how this plays out, check out NPR’s fantastic series, York and Fig. It profiles those affected by—and profiting from—the rapidly-gentrifying Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.) As a middle-class white person who has lived in working-class neighborhoods in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, I am ashamed to admit that I have benefitted from living in working-class neighborhoods where rent remained (temporarily) low even though there were cool new shops and restaurants opening up down the street. Is there anything that can be done to stop pricing people out of the neighborhoods they grew up in? Or is gentrification just an ugly, inevitable element of every urban environment?

The Atlantic points out that gentrification reflects “a moral imperative to reject the suburbs: to disavow environmentally-destructive sprawl and alleged ethnic homogeneity and cultural sterility.” Which is a good moral imperative, if you ask me, but that doesn’t let gentrifiers off the hook. The fact is, gentrification happens whether middle- and upper-class whites migrate to less affluent parts of the city or not. Due to economic segregation, low-income residents are often trapped in less desirable neighborhoods where the schools and hospitals are not as nice, where crime rates are higher, and where the city generally doesn’t care about how clean the sidewalks and parks are. Behind all of this is a dysfunctional housing system “that's set up to allow market forces to push up prices without regard for people who might be excluded, and to prevent market forces from building more homes and mitigating that exclusion.”

In asking the question about what can be done, it’s crucial to remember that we are all in this together. Everyday Feminism has some great jumping-off points toward effecting positive change. Familiarizing yourself with ballot measures that are detrimental to low-income populations and voting against them is one simple way to help. If you’re an upper- or middle-class resident of a community in transition, get to know the people in that community. Acknowledge your privilege rather than abuse it. Listen to and respect your neighbors rather than assuming you know what’s best for them. Get involved in neighborhood organizations and fight to keep the best interests of all residents in mind. Educate yourself on tenant rights and advocate for those in your neighborhood who might unfairly be facing eviction. Now we’re talking about serious involvement. If it scares you, maybe that’s a sign of something.

As you ponder all of this, I encourage you to visit Grand Central Market. Explore it. Enjoy it. Talk to the people who work there. Spend some money at a stall that may be struggling to maintain the business it has operated for decades. Ask your friends to do the same. The market is a portal into Los Angeles history, and we should all be fighting to preserve it.

While in the neighborhood, visit Angel's Flight, the Bradbury Building, and the Broad Museum.

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