Border Bargains
Turn your house into a hacienda with Talavera tile and terra-cotta pots, hand-blown glassware and hand-carved furniture: a guide to thirty shops just across the Rio Grande where the quality is high and the prices aren't.
(Page 3 of 4)
Ciudad Juárez
ENTER JUAREZ VIA THE CORDOVA BRIDGE and you’ll find yourself on Avenida Lincoln, home to all but two of the shops listed here. Because the city is in an isolated location for road-trippers (even by Texas standards), many shoppers fly into El Paso; therefore most of Juárez’s larger, more-established furniture stores will deliver to El Paso for a fee, and most of the smaller stores will also do their best to get your goods across the river. Driving here can be exhausting, not because of the poor condition of the streets or the seemingly haphazard one-way signs (pick up a map at the tourist office at the El Paso Convention and Visitors Bureau, 1 Civic Center Plaza, on Santa Fe, 800-351-6024), but because of all the “parking hustlers,” notable for the red rags they use to flag down cars. They’ll grab your side-view mirror and practically jump on your hood to entice you to park where they can “watch” your car for a couple of bucks. It’s up to you whether to pay them or not, but remember: They’re with your car when you’re not.
Muebles del Pueblito, in the Pueblito Mexicano mall near the bridge, Avenida Lincoln 147, at Zempoala, 16-29-01-44. A relative newcomer, Pueblito carries items that are unique and carefully selected. This is the only place I saw picture frames by Cantera de Diseño. These fired-clay frames in muted colors with subtle geometric reliefs are so chic, they’re sure to show up in a Horchow catalog any day now ($12 for a large frame that holds a three-and-a-half-inch-square picture). The Talavera pottery here is certified lead-free (a one-quart bowl with painted grapes, apples, and pears was $23). A well-crafted iron side table with basket-weave details and gracefully curving legs was $187 (the price is higher than average, but then so is the level of design and craftsmanship). Co-owner Adriana de Leal says the shop will ship your purchases anywhere in the U.S. if the freight is paid COD.
Mexican Tile, Avenida Lincoln 1205, 16-16-50-25; no credit cards. Here’s a tiny store with tiny prices on a tiny selection of Talavera and Saltillo tiles. A case of 100 decorative four-by-four-inch Talavera tiles was $37, and a 30-tile mural of a village or mission scene was $89. A case of 11 one-foot-square Saltillo tiles was $8.91 for glazed tiles, $7.59 for unglazed.
Miranda Puertas y Vitrales, Avenida Lincoln 1188, 16-11-24-84; personal checks accepted, no credit cards. Don’t even think rustic much less request it when you walk into Juárez’s premier door store. Select from dozens of styles (or take in your own design) crafted from mahogany, poplar, oak, or pine, some with beveled-glass panes and side panels. Prices start at $475 for a simple oak-and-glass entry door.
Alfarería Azteca, Avenida Lincoln 1170, 16-16-19-36; personal checks accepted, no credit cards. If you’re beginning to lament the demise of Mexican kitsch, check out the fountains on the second floor of this multilevel shop. In the basin of one, small clay pots are suspended in a “lava flow” of that expanding spray foam used to insulate houses, plastic greenery is stuck here and there, and the whole thing is spray-painted bright green with accents of shiny gold and brass paint. It’s so ugly it’s almost worth the $162 price tag. For those with slightly more conventional tastes, there are lamps made from Talavera “ginger jars” ($65 to $85), trios of carved-limestone fish that serve as coffee-table bases ($180), and metal baker’s racks ($250 without glass shelves). Some of the best bargains can be found up on the roof, where a collection of iron furniture slowly rusts (chairs around $65, table bases $90).
Pueblo Wrought Iron, Etc., Avenida Lincoln 1151, 16-16-77-71; personal checks accepted, no credit cards. This is a strictly cash-and-carry business; the owners don’t want to hassle with the border crossing. Considering the bargains here, you won’t care. There is an ironworks on-site, so metal table bases ($58 for a round coffee table, complete with rust), birdcages ($225 for a six-foot-tall cage in which a cockatoo could easily stretch its wings), and light fixtures ($9.50 for a carriage lamp) are great buys. (This place is happy to take custom orders, especially for ironwork.)
The shop also casts its own concrete forms, and you reap the rewards. For a mere $115, you can break an axle dragging home a concrete picnic table and two benches. A small concrete frame for a window or a niche in the traditional square-within-a-clover-leaf design was $25 and a five-foot Saint Francis only $75. A twelve-foot fountain with four dishes was $400. Even the items imported from the interior, like the equipal table and four chairs ($321), the eight-foot carved-pine columns ($80), and the five-by-five-foot wooden screens with stylized designs chiseled on both sides ($197), were priced to sell.
El Patio, Avenida Lincoln 787, 16-16-22-06; personal checks accepted. Every border town seems to have one store that endures through the years and serves as a kind of shopper magnet to the benefit of all the shops in town. In Juárez several might claim the distinction, but none is more qualified than El Patio, a border institution since 1975. The selection of merchandise is truly overwhelming, even if the bargains are not. Nowhere else did I find brightly painted pine armoires with cornices trimmed in Talavera tiles and doors and sides inlaid with Talavera dinner plates decorated with smiling suns ($800). Six feet high and four feet wide, these would make great TV cabinets that could entertain you even with the doors shut. (They’re much more tasteful than they sound.)
El Patio’s cement statuary includes the standard guard lions ($66.95 for one the size of a Norwegian elkhound) as well as more-novel shapes like crouching lizards ($14 for one the size of a squirrel) and a mermaid ($159.95). The sign out front boasts the largest selection of light fixtures, and this is not an exaggeration: Thousands of fixtures in hundreds of styles festoon the ceiling and walls. Besides the ubiquitous punched-tin luminarias and garish copper coach lights, we saw simple blown-glass lights sheathed in perforated metal cylinders ($29.95) and replicas of Victorian chandeliers dripping with colored-glass tubes ($245). Although the sales clerk said this was a fixed-price store, willing to bargain only on wholesale orders, I noticed some wild price discrepancies on similar items. In the entry area, I was shocked by the $1,250 price of a simply painted pine table with four high-back chairs. When I wandered into another section of the store, the same-style table and chairs, painted à la Grandma Moses by one Felipe Benítez, were only $630.
Some of the primitive antiques and nostalgia items here were so expensive I thought I was in Fredericksburg. A couple of cast-iron carousel chickens were tagged at $350 each, and an old black rotary-dial telephone was $149. Lest you assume that an item’s one-of-a-kind status merits such prices, let me tell you about the basement we wandered into by accident. Dozens of old children’s pedal cars were stacked to the ceiling, awaiting paint jobs. Old wooden wagon wheels, which had seemed unique when displayed alone upstairs, lost some of their allure when I saw them piled in a corner. Even the 1916 coal-fired moving-picture projector had a few clones in this warehouse. Unless you know your antiques, stick with the pieces produced in Mexico, like the carved-wood mirror frame large enough for Alice to slip through even after she has eaten the mushroom, resplendent with rugged cherubs and odalisque ($495). And don’t miss the baroque frescoed chapel upstairs, where you can try praying for a miraculous extension on your Visa credit line.
Recubrimientos de Mármol, Calle Mejía 2560, just off the ProNaf Circle (Avenida Lincoln becomes the ProNaf Circle), next to Willy’s Disco, 16-16-13-60. When my husband and I priced granite countertops for our kitchen a couple of years ago, we quickly saw the beauty of concrete as an alternative. Recubrimientos de Mármol offers even more alternatives: marble tiles in four sizes and fourteen shades of black, gray, green, and pink. (Consider delicate rojo vino, for example, at $1.57 a square foot, or sexy negro Monterrey for $3 a square foot.) There are no solid countertop-size slabs of marble here, but you can get a tabletop of blanco Aurora forty inches in diameter for $600.
Decor, on the ProNaf Circle, across from the Plaza of the Americas, 16-13-14-15; personal checks accepted, no credit cards. This store reeks of quiet desperation. Judging by the brochure (which must be more than twenty years old), Decor must have given El Patio a run for its money back when the complex included an upstairs restaurant, a “beauty and wig salon,” an art gallery, and in-house iron and furniture factories. Now much of the building is boarded up or for rent, but you can still watch the glassblowers at work. Inventory was low when we were there, and the peso’s devaluation had resulted in a sale—25 percent off everything and 40 percent off glassware—that sent prices into the giveaway zone: plates for a buck, tumblers for $1.50, shot glasses for 60 cents. (For $4, my husband bought two big glass paperweights, about two pounds each, to use as fish eyes in one of his metal sculptures.)
My Library
