Ambulance|Grand Central Market — Breakfast Before the Worst Day

The neon has been buzzing over 317 South Broadway since 1917. Chile ristras, a sign for Economy Meats, tile counters worn smooth by a century of elbows — Grand Central Market is the oldest continuously operating public market in Los Angeles, and it is the one place in this film where nobody is shooting at anybody.

Michael Bay filmed paramedic scenes here, Cam Thompson and her partner Scott among the stalls, before the day turns. It is a deliberate choice. Everything else in Ambulance happens at eighty miles an hour inside a steel box. This happens standing still, over food, in a room full of strangers minding their own business. You need to see the ordinary city before you watch it get torn up.

The building underneath is the Homer Laughlin Building, 1897, with Frank Lloyd Wright's first Los Angeles office once upstairs. Downstairs it has always been groceries: Jewish, then Mexican, then Salvadoran, now also Thai and Filipino and whatever opened last month.

Go on a weekday before noon. Order at a counter that has been there longer than you have — Roast to Go opened in 1952, China Cafe in 1959 — and eat standing up. The market is open every day, free to enter, and it will still smell like griddle smoke and cut limes long after the movie is forgotten.

Photo: "Los Angeles - DTLA: Homer Laughlin Building and Grand Central Market" by Wally Gobetz, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 via Flickr.