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The Bacon-Wrapped Hot Dog: So Good It's Illegal
Jailed for selling L.A.'s famed "heart attack" dogs, licensed street vendors are fighting back
Last May, she was sentenced to 45 days in county jail for repeatedly violating food codes. Once out, Palacios and her companeros on the streets of the Fashion District formed an advocacy group to protest what they call harassment on the part of police and inspectors, fully aware that they are fighting an uphill battle. As the gentrification of downtown creeps south and east into territory once exclusively working-class, many of the immigrant and gritty, organically evolved elements of the urban landscape — like street vendors and bacon-wrapped hot dogs — are being gradually pushed out.
"They told me, 'The mayor wants to make this area like New York, Times Square,' but I told them, 'Who told him we want that? The people who come here are not like that.' Ninety-nine percent of the people here are mexicanos. Here, you don't really see americanos. One or two," she says. "Why are they coming now to get us out of here? Why the abuse? Why the abuse?"
Gregory Bojorquez
Burned: Elizabeth Palacios, jailed for grilling, now baconless
Not that Palacios would mind more enforcement against the unlicensed vendors who are her primary competition. You see, the typical bacon-wrapped hot-dog enthusiast, as Palacios points out, isn't likely to notice that there are two tiers in L.A.'s hot-dog-vendor community. On top are licensed vendors who sell dogs and snacks from motorized Cushman carts that are often modified (sometimes outside of code), depending on what the vendor is hawking. Their vehicles are registered, their fees paid. Every day, their carts return to commissaries, where the vehicles must be cleared, scrubbed and stored. A sign of success for a legal hot-dog vendor is the possession of more than one Cushman cart. Palacios, in addition to the cart she operates on Los Angeles Street, owns two others. She farms out their management to relatives.
Below the legal vendors are the more ubiquitous operators of homemade carts, which usually consist of propane tanks strapped to modified baby strollers, Target shopping carts or, in most cases, tool carts. They operate completely outside of codes and regulations, their particular rules and organizational methods a mystery to outsiders.
Licensed vendors like Palacios refer to the makeshift bacon-wrapped-hot-dog vendors as "ambulantes" or "piratas," colloquial terms for unlicensed street vendors in Mexico. The ambulantes of L.A. present a host of problems not only for licensed vendors, who often get lumped together in the media with the pirate cart owners, but for law-enforcement and health-and-safety officials as well.
For starters, they are almost impossible to track. They usually set up shop on a street for just a short while and then leave. When piratas' shabbily constructed illegal carts are confiscated, vendors rarely show up for hearings or pay impound fees to have their carts returned. That is, if they stick around long enough to be served with a citation. In many instances, illegal hot-dog vendors literally run off at the sight of police or the Fashion District's Business Improvement District (BID) safety-team officers, abandoning their dogs and condiments.
At the Fashion District BID offices on 15th Street, operations manager Randall Tampa says his safety-team officers regularly come across abandoned homemade hot-dog vending carts that must be gathered up and hauled into storage. Some tacked-on grills grow hot to the touch, Tampa says, endangering small children who stand at eye level with the illegal carts' pans.
"There's absolutely no semblance of any health codes being followed in those carts," Tampa says, while surveying the heaps of makeshift carts collected in a BID work yard.
But even the authoritiesunderstand the appeal of the bacon-wrapped hot dog. "They're tasty," says Andy Smith of the LAPD's downtown Central Division. Smith made a name for himself in the Fashion District for leading enforcement raids against illegal vendors, sometimes inviting along members of the news media. Merchants in the Fashion District sometimes ask for enforcement against illegal hot-dog vendors, Smith says, because the burning grease from their makeshift grills soils fabrics in storefronts.
"If somebody comes in with no overhead and no bills and no sanitary counters and starts selling hot dogs," Smith says, "you certainly can't complete with any of that."
Now a commander, he remains adamant in urging eaters to understand that when prepared on the street, bacon-wrapped hot dogs are illegal on several levels, and potentially hazardous to your health.
"I've seen cockroaches just pour out of the bottom," he says. "I've seen meat sitting out in the sun for hours. We've seen hot-dog carts where the owner has a little bottle where he urinates, because he doesn't want to leave his cart. And he stores the bottle alongside his food."
Plus, unlicensed vendors are not above getting abusive with police and inspectors.
"Walking away, some of them get a little verbally aggressive," says Tampa. "My guys have had these things thrown at them."
Authorities also say that in some areas of the city, unlicensed vendors pay "taxes" to local gangs. In the Fashion District, the presence of a senior lead officer assigned specifically to tackle illegal street vending has prevented the encroachment of gang extortion among hot-dog vendors. That officer, Randall McCain, has been patrolling the downtown streets for more than 13 years, stopping regularly to chat and catch up with the hot-dog vendors, many of whom are on a first-name basis with him.
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