Union Stock Yards
[1] The Union Stockyards operated in the South Side's New City community area for 106 years,[2] helping Chicago become known as the "hog butcher for the world", the center of the American meatpacking industry for decades.
The stockyards became the focal point of the rise of some of the earliest international companies, whose ability to get product moved across the world became crucial.
The United States government purchased a great deal of beef and pork to feed the Union troops fighting the Civil War.
[17] With an influx of butchers and small meat packing concerns, the number of businesses greatly increased to process the flood of livestock being shipped to the Chicago stockyards.
[13] Keeping up with the huge number of animals arriving each day proved impossible until a new wave of consolidation and modernization altered the meatpacking business in the post-Civil War era.
[citation needed] The Union Stock Yards, designed to consolidate operations, was built in 1864 on marshland south of the city.
[20] At its largest area, The Yards covered nearly 1 square mile (3 km2) of land, from Halsted Street to Ashland Avenue and from 39th (now Pershing Rd.)
So much stockyard waste drained into the South Fork of the river that it was called Bubbly Creek due to the gaseous products of decomposition.
[26] The meatpacking district was served between 1908 and 1957 by a short Chicago 'L' line with several stops, devoted primarily to the daily transport of thousands of workers and even tourists to the site.
[29] The area and scale of the stockyards, along with technological advancements in rail transport and refrigeration, allowed for the creation of some of America's first truly global companies led by entrepreneurs such as Gustavus Franklin Swift and Philip Danforth Armour.
The mechanized process with its killing wheel and conveyors helped inspire the automobile assembly line that Henry Ford popularized in 1913.
[citation needed] In addition, hedging transactions by the stockyard companies were pivotal in the establishment and growth of the Chicago-based commodity exchanges and futures markets.
[40] In 2004, a memorial to all Chicago firefighters who have died in the line of duty was erected just behind the Union Stock Yards Gate at the intersection of Exchange Avenue and Peoria Street.
He shows how the Union Stock Yard shaped the surrounding ethnic neighborhoods and supported the upward mobility of tens of thousands of immigrant families, especially the Polish employees.
He rejects the old Muckraking theme of Upton Sinclair's 1905 novel The Jungle that vividly described filthy and unsanitary practices that Pacyga says did not happen.
In all Pacyga depicts the rise of the stockyards as an American spectacle of the modern age, one that attracted millions of students and tourists to witness the dramatic scene of meat processing.
Pacyga closes by tracing the stockyards' steady decline and disappearance in the 1950s as more profit could be made by moving the slaughtering closer to the western farms and ranches, using trucks instead of rail for transportation.
In the early 1860s the meat packing industry of the United States was still located in Cincinnati, Ohio, the original "Porkopolis" of the pre-Civil War era.
As early as 1827, Archibauld Clybourn had established himself as a butcher in a log slaughter house on the north branch of the Chicago River and supplied most to the garrison of Fort Dearborn.
In 1848, the Bull's Head Stockyard began operations at Madison Street and Ogden Avenue on the West Side of Chicago.
Operations for this early stockyard, however, still meant holding and feeding cattle and hogs in transit to meat packing plants further east especially Indianapolis and Cincinnati.
Direct sales of livestock from breeders to packers, facilitated by advancement in interstate trucking, made it cheaper to slaughter animals where they were raised and excluded the intermediary stockyards.
[citation needed] A remnant of the Union Stock Yard Gate still arches over Exchange Avenue, next to the firefighters' memorial, and can be seen by those driving along Halsted Street.
[citation needed] The stockyards are considered one of the chief forces that molded the animal–industrial complex into its present form under contemporary capitalism.
[4]: 299 According to Kim Stallwood, Chicago and its stockyards from 1865 are one of the two milestones that mark the shift in human attitudes toward animals that empowered the animal–industrial complex, the other being the post–World War II developments such as intensive factory farms, industrial fishing, and xenotransplantation.
[4]: 299–300 According to sociologist David Nibert, the Chicago slaughterhouses were significant economic powers of the early 20th century and were "famous for the cruel, rapid-paced killing and disassembly of enormous numbers of animals.
