Union Stock Yards

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Union Stockyards, 1941

The Union Stock Yard & Transit Co. , also known as The Yards for short , was a large meat industry company in the New City district of Chicago in the US state of Illinois . Between 1865 and 1971, she ensured that Chicago became known as the “hog butcher for the world” and was the center of the American meat processing industry for decades. Starting with the Civil War through the 1920s and the busiest year of 1924, Chicago processed more meat than any other place in the world. The company started operations at Christmasbuilt in 1865 after six months of construction. The yards ceased operations at midnight on July 30, 1971 after several decades of decline during the decentralization of the meat industry. The entrance building ( Union Stock Yards Gate ) was declared a Chicago Memorial on February 24, 1972 and a National Historic Landmark on May 29, 1981 . The assembly line production of meat developed in the Stock Yards was trend-setting for the design of slaughterhouses all over the world and is still used today in a further developed form.

history

The Union Stockyards in Chicago, 1878
The Union Stock Yard Gate in the 19th century.
Union Stock Yards Meat Inspectors in a Gustavus Franklin Swift slaughterhouse (1906)

Before the buildings were erected, innkeepers offered feed and care for herds of cattle waiting to be sold. As the railroad became more widespread in the United States , storage yards were established in and around the city. In 1848 many small storage areas were scattered along the rail lines across the entire city. There were a number of reasons for the amalgamation of all these storage areas: The westward expansion of the railroad brought prosperity to a Chicago that was developing into a railroad hub; the Civil War blockade of the Mississippi , which disrupted the trade route along the river; the influence of meat processors and cattle on Chicago. To bring the businesses together, the Union Stock Yards were built in the marshland south of the city. A consortium of nine railroad companies (hence the name Union ) acquired a 320  acre (130 hectare) piece of marshland in southwest Chicago in 1864 for the then price of 100,000 US dollars . The yards were connected to the city's main railroad lines by a 15-mile long railroad. In the end, the area, which had grown to 375 acres (150 hectares), had 2,300 separate pens and lots of saloons, hotels, restaurants and administrative buildings. Under the direction of Timothy Blackstone , one of the founders and first President of the Union Stock Yards and Transit Company, the yards experienced tremendous growth. While around two million head of cattle were processed in 1870, the number rose to nine million in 1890. Between 1865 and 1900, around 400 million head of cattle were slaughtered on the site. At the turn of the 20th century, the yards employed 25,000 people and produced 82 percent of US meat. In 1921 40,000 people worked here. Two thousand of these employees were directly employed by Union Stock Yard & Transit Co., while the remainder worked for companies such as the meat processors that had factories on the premises. By 1900, the 475 acre (190 hectare) site included around 80 km (50 miles) of road and had 208 km (130 miles) of rails along its borders. At peak times, the yards covered nearly a square mile of land (2.6 km²) from Halsted Street to Ashland Avenue and from 39th Street, now Pershing Road, to 47th Street.

Every day, around 1.9 million liters of water were pumped from the Chicago River into the yards. The southern arm of the river was so polluted by sewage from the site that the river was nicknamed Bubbly Creek due to the gases produced by the rotting of the sewage . The side arm still bubbles today. When the city reversed the flow of the Chicago River in 1900, it was done to prevent the yard's sewage and other sewage from the city from polluting Lake Michigan, and thus the city's drinking water reservoir.

The meat packer quarter was approached between 1908 and 1957 by a short line of the “ L ” with a few stops. This was mainly done for the daily transport of the thousands of workers and tourists to the site. The line was built when the city was forced to remove the rails on 40th Street.

and display information about the image
Processing of pigs in the Union Stock Yards

Effects on Industry

The size and extent of the yards, and technological advances in rail transport and refrigeration, encouraged the emergence of the first American global companies founded by entrepreneurs such as Gustavus Franklin Swift and Philip Danforth Armor . The mechanized process with its killing wheel and conveyor belts gave the automotive industry the inspiration for today's production lines. Moreover played stockyard companies on the yard a key role in the creation and growth of the Chicago commodity and futures exchange .

Many meat packaging companies were concentrated around the yards, including Armor and Company , Swift & Company , Morris & Company, and GH Hammond . Eventually related industries flourished in the neighborhood, making leather, soap, fertilizer, glue, gelatin, shoe polish, buttons, perfume, imitation ivory, and violin strings.

fire

Memorial to the deceased firefighters

On December 22, 1910, a fire broke out on the site, causing $ 400,000 in damage and killing twenty-one firefighters. Among the dead was the Fire Marshal (comparable to a German fire brigade director or district fire chief) James J. Horan . Fifty fire engine and seven ladder truck crews fought the major fire, which Chief Seyferlich reported on December 23 as having been extinguished. In 2004, on the site of the 1910 fire, a memorial was inaugurated for all Chicago firefighters who lost their lives in the pursuit of their work.

Decline and Usage Today

The Union Stock Yards' pens, 1880

The flowering of the yards was due to the concentration of the railroad and the development of refrigerated cars. Their decline came due to further developments in the transport and distribution system after the Second World War . The direct sale of slaughter cattle from the breeders to the processing plants, promoted by the further development of truck traffic, made it cheaper to slaughter the animals directly at the breeder and not to take them to central collection points first. At first, the big meat processing companies resisted, but Smith and Armor both gave in and left their factories in the yard in the 1950s.

In 1971 the area between Pershing Road, Ashland, Halsted, and 47th Street was rededicated as the Stockyards Industrial Park . The neighborhood to the west and south of the industrial park is still known as the Back of the Yards and is still home to a thriving immigrant population.

Entrance building

The Union Stock Yard Gate in 2008.

A remnant of the entrance gates still spans Exchange Avenue, next to the memorial to the firefighters. You can see the building as you drive down Halsted Street. This limestone building that marked the entrance to the yards is one of the few remains from when Chicago was the city of cattle and meat industries. The ox skull above the central arch is said to represent Sherman , a prize bull named after John B. Sherman , one of the founders of the Union Stock Yard and Transit Company.

useful information

  • The site was a major tourist attraction and was visited by, for example, Rudyard Kipling , Paul Bourget and Sarah Bernhardt .
  • In 1906, Upton Sinclair published his book The Jungle , which exposed the dire conditions on the site at the turn of the 20th century.
  • Carl Sandburg alludes to the yards in his poem Chicago : “proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation”.
  • Frank Sinatra mentioned the yards in his 1964 song My Kind of Town .
  • The yards are mentioned in the first chapter of Thomas Pynchon's novel Against the Day .
  • On January 9, 2007, a large fire destroyed a large warehouse belonging to the Rosebud Display and Packaging Company on the north side of the yards, less than two kilometers from the memorial.
  • Skip James 'song Hard Time Killin' Floor Blues refers to the nickname of The Yards Slaughterhouse during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
  • The play Saint Joan of the Stockyards by Bertolt Brecht plays in Chicago in the late 1920s and on the other hand focuses on the poor working conditions in the stockyards and the workers' struggle.

See also

literature

  • John Anderson: 'Hog butcher for the world' opens shop . In: Chicago Tribune , January 30, 1997, Chicago, p. 2, sec. 2.
  • James R. Barrett: Work . 3rd ed. Kendall / Hunt Publishing Company, Dubuque 1982.
  • W. Jos. Grant: Illustrated History of the Union Stockyards . Chicago, 1901.
  • Rick Halpern: Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago's Packinghouses, 1904-54 . University of Illinois Press, Chicago 1997.
  • Susan Hirsch, Robert I. Goler: A City Comes of Age: Chicago in the 1890s . Chicago Historical Society, Chicago 1990.
  • Glen E. Holt, Dominic A. Pacyga: Chicago: A Historical Guide to the Neighborhoods: the Loop and South Side . Chicago Historical Society, Chicago 1979.
  • Thomas J. Jablonsky: Pride in the Jungle: Community and Everyday Life in Back of the Yards Chicago . Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1993.
  • JG List, George Schoettle: Union Stockyards Fire Photo Album . CHS, 1934.
  • Olivia Mahoney; Go West! Chicago and American Expansion . Chicago Historical Society, Chicago 1999.
  • Dominic Pacyga: Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago: Workers on the South Side , 1880-1922. Ohio State University Press, Columbus 1991.
  • Dominic Pacyga, Ellen Skerrett: Chicago: City of Neighborhoods . Loyola University Press, Chicago 1986.
  • William Parkhurst: History of the Yards , 1865-1953. Chicago 1953.
  • William Rice: City creates nation's livestock center . In: Chicago Tribune , July 16, 1997, Chicago, p. 7b, sec. 7.
  • Jimmy Skaggs: Prime Cut: Livestock Raising and Meatpacking in the US . Texas A&M University Press, College Station TX 1986.
  • Robert A. Slayton, Back of the Yards: The Making of a Local Democracy . The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1986.
  • Paul Street: Packinghouse Blues . In: Chicago History , 18, no. 3, 1989, pp. 68-85., Bibliography . Chicago Historical Society. Retrieved March 6, 2007.
  • Report of the Fire Marshal . Chicago (Ill.). Fire Dept., 1910, pp. 23-24.

Web links

Commons : Chicago stockyards  - collection of images, videos, and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Pacyga, Dominic: Union Stock Yard . Chicago Historical Society. 2005. Retrieved February 1, 2009.
  2. ^ Carl Sandburg : Chicago . 1916
  3. ↑ Meatpacking . In: James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, Janice L. Ruff (Eds.): Encyclopedia of Chicago , pp. 515-517, University of Chicago Press, 2004, ISBN 0-226-31015-9
  4. ↑ a b c Chicago Landmarks . Chicago Landmarks. Archived from the original on February 3, 2007. Retrieved March 6, 2007.
  5. ↑ National Historic Landmarks Survey: Listing of National Historic Landmarks by State: Illinois (PDF; 23 kB) Archived from the original on March 18, 2009. Retrieved March 7, 2007.
  6. ↑ Old Stone Gate, Chicago Union Stockyards . National Park Service. Archived from the original on May 28, 2008. Retrieved March 30, 2007.
  7. ^ A b The Birth of the Chicago Union Stock Yards . Chicago Historical Society. 2001. Archived from the original on March 19, 2011. Retrieved March 6, 2011.
  8. ↑ a b c d The Birth of the Chicago Union Stock Yards . Chicago Historical Society. 2001. Archived from the original on February 16, 2007. Retrieved March 9, 2007.
  9. ↑ Union Stock Yards . University of Chicago. Retrieved March 9, 2007.
  10. ↑ a b c d Union Stock Yard & Transit Co. In: James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, Janice L. Ruff (Eds.): Encyclopedia of Chicago . University of Chicago Press, 2004, ISBN 0-226-31015-9 , page 947.
  11. ↑ a b c Meatpacking Technology . Chicago Historical Society. 2001. Archived from the original on April 4, 2007. Retrieved March 9, 2007.
  12. ↑ a b 1865 Chicago Stories . Chicago Public Library. Retrieved March 6, 2007.
  13. ↑ 1865 Chicago Union Stock Yard Completed . Chicago Public Library. 1997. Archived from the original on March 7, 2007. Retrieved February 1, 2009.
  14. ↑ David M. Solzman: The Chicago River: An Illustrated History and Guide to the River and its Waterways . Loyola Press, Chicago 1998, ISBN 0-8294-1023-6 , pp. 226-227.
  15. ↑ Stock Yards branch . Chicago “L” .org. Retrieved March 22, 2007.
  16. ↑ 1910, December 22-23: Chicago Union Stock Yards Fire . Compiled by Chicago Municipal Reference Library. 1997. Archived from the original on June 7, 2007. Retrieved February 1, 2009.
  17. ↑ James R. Barrett: Back of the Yards . Chicago Historical Society. 2005. Retrieved March 9, 2007.
  18. ↑ My Kind Of Town . lyricsfreak.com. Retrieved March 31, 2007.
  19. Jump up ↑ Rafael Romo, John Cody and the STNG Wire: Firefighters Battle South Side Warehouse Blaze . CBS Broadcasting Inc. January 9, 2007. Retrieved February 1, 2009.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / cbs2chicago.com

Coordinates: 41 ° 48 ′ 56.6 "  N , 87 ° 39 ′ 23.6"  W.