It doesn't get any fresher than this
The huge sign out front is impossible to miss: A yellow chicken stands in profile behind the words ``Live Poultry Fresh Killed."
``It's a landmark in the neighborhood," says Mike Williams, manager of the Mayflower Poultry Co. in East Cambridge.
With its white tiled walls, Mayflower Poultry has the look of an old-fashioned meat market. A long enamel and glass display case is stocked with piles of drumsticks, wings, breasts, thighs, and whole birds sitting on ice.
Only the T-shirts and thong underwear for sale, emblazoned with the famous sign, make it clear that it's not the 20th century anymore.
Owner Jim Gould knows that shops like his are increasingly hard to find in Boston. His company was founded in 1932 in the North End, but construction of the Callahan Tunnel prompted Leo Silver, the original owner, to move the shop to East Cambridge in 1945. If it weren't for Mayflower's pre existing status in the area, Gould says, he doesn't imagine that he'd have much luck getting state or neighborhood approval to start a poultry-processing business nowadays in the middle of a dense, residential area.
``One of the negatives of having fresh, bloody product is it stinks," Gould says of a typical worry. And without owning their building, few meat markets can survive in the city anymore, he says. But ethnic groups that prize fresh-slaughtered chickens, plus generations of cooks loyal to their neighborhood traditions, have kept business coming in.
Just before 6 a.m. on a weekday, Luis Feliciano is standing in a back room in his wading boots, getting ready to slaughter 25 chickens, sitting quietly in plastic crates on the floor. Feliciano, 54, can't exactly remember how long he's been taking out live birds at Mayflower (``close to 20 years"), but it's clear from his swift, precise movements and his unflappable, friendly air that he's a pro.
Feliciano opens one crate door and pulls out several birds and nimbly slides them into metal stirrups so they are hanging upside down by their feet inside a cone-like container. Some chickens squawk loudly and bang against the side of the funnel, others go along limply with the situation. Then, with surgical precision, Feliciano pulls the birds out of the cones one by one, slices a blade across their throats, and leaves them to bleed into a shallow trough filled with blood and feathers.
The smell is intense near Feliciano's breakfast mug of café con leche and buttered roll, sitting half-eaten.
He puts the dead birds into a vat of hot water for cleaning and then tosses them into a large machine that removes the feathers by spinning the carcasses around some large rubber nubs. The process takes just a few seconds. After the birds are defeathered, Feliciano puts them in a large tub filled with cold running water. One by one, he removes a chicken, cleans out the offal -- saving the heart, gizzard, and liver -- and returns it to the cold water. Most customers, particularly the Chinese, who order the fresh birds want the head and the feet intact, Feliciano says. Others, like West Indians, just want the feet, he says.
``The first day, the meat is tough," Gould says of the freshly killed birds. The staff and longtime customers all say poultry self-tenderizes, so waiting 24 to 48 hours after the slaughtering makes a big difference between a tough bird and a tender one, Gould says.
All 25 birds are done in less than a half-hour. Feliciano will go through the same routine the next morning.
Do the birds have an inkling of their fate when he opens the crate door? ``Oh, yeah," says Feliciano, grinning as he pulls out a bird by the feet as it squawks loudly and thrashes its wings.
Does he still eat chicken even after being surrounded by it for so many years? ``Every day!"
Despite knowing ``almost nothing" about poultry, Jim Gould bought the company in 1996. Gould, who had been in the trucking industry, kept on virtually all of the employees who had been working there under the former owner to handle the retail trade while he refocused the company on wholesale business, mainly to local catering companies, Indian and Chinese restaurants, and popular takeout joints like Anna's Taqueria.
``People come in and claim it's better and less expensive than at the supermarkets," Gould says. ``Because we sell so much to restaurants, nothing is here more than a day or two."
Though two employees operate a tiny deboning operation next to the store, much of the chicken sold to customers is already processed and shipped daily from a poultry farm in Delaware, Gould says. Live birds are brought in from Wings Poultry Farm in Connecticut for twice-weekly slaughtering.
They are ``all-natural," a loose marketing term that primarily means the feed has no animal by-products in it and the birds were not treated with antibiotics. It differs from ``certified organic," which means, in addition, no non organic fertilizers and no pesticides were used in the raising of the chickens, he says. Growth hormones have been banned from poultry farming since the 1960s.
Though the wholesale business is good, Gould says the retail traffic has been down in the last few years. He blames several forces at work: A Shaw's supermarket is just a few blocks away; there has been road work on Cambridge Street for three years in a row, driving away both cars and parking spaces; and there has been a significant population shift in the neighborhood. What was once a blue-collar ethnic enclave first of Irish and, later, Portuguese, Polish, and Italians is now a broader mix that includes Brazilians, West Indians, Latinos, Chinese, and whites working nearby in the biotechnology field or at MIT.
``People continue to shop here because they grew up here and they want fresh," says Williams, who sees many customers who drop in because their parents and grandparents used to shop there.
The store, by the way, doesn't smell at all. Marie Nelson of Cambridge comes in twice a week to pick some whole birds, legs, and wings, says her daughter, Carline. The pair, speaking in Haitian Creole, carefully consider a freshly killed pullet with the head and feet still on before settling on a couple of pounds of hearts and gizzards and a large, cut-up fowl. The laying hens, usually a couple of years old, are a fairly tough bird favored by Haitian customers for stews because the meat holds up to slow cooking, Gould says.
Freezer cases hold a variety of vacuum-packaged ethnic specialties, including goat meat, chitterlings, chicken feet, oxtail, squab, and beef feet. There are fresh rabbit and tripe and, for those who dare, even alligator or rooster, Williams says. Several customers, including the local mail carrier, drop by just for the fresh eggs.
Christina Pazzanese can be reached at cpazzanese@globe.com. 
