Slaughterhouse: Chicago’s Union Stock Yard and the World It Made by Dominic A. Pacyga (review)

Shortly after its founding in 1865, the Union Stock Yard made Chicago synonymous with meatpacking for over a century until its closing in 1971. For many, this conjures up images, or more precisely smells, of meat rendering and decomposing entrails in Chicago’s infamous Bubbly Creek. Without perfuming the history of the square mile occupied by Chicago’s meat industry, Dominic Pacyga sees much more than a rank past. He boldly declares: “The Chicago Stockyards helped drag the world into … ‘the modern’” (2). It did this, as Pacyga reveals, by changing the age-old relationship between man and food. In a compelling argument, he notes, “The Union Stock Yard showed how ingenuity, greed, science, and industrialization created the modern world” (4).

Pacyga details how “the yards,” as the area occupied by the Union Stock Yard is still commonly referred to, came about due to efforts of Chicago capitalists to centralize the livestock business of not only of the city but also of the entire nation. From its origins as a livestock market that supplied nearby and eastern slaughterhouses, the yards quickly drew the attention of meatpackers due to Chicago’s central geographic location and importance as a railroad hub. Packers began opening new slaughterhouses next to the yards; by the mid-1880s, twenty-nine major packinghouses had operations in the area that became known as Packingtown. Reaching its peak during World War I and the immediate years afterward, the Chicago packing industry employed around fifty thousand people and unloaded 18.6 million heads of livestock a year, much of it slaughtered in Packingtown. These details alone demonstrate the importance of Chicago’s Union Stock Yard in regards to U.S. industrial and labor histories.

Previous historians have chronicled the history of the Union Stock Yard, Packingtown, and its surrounding neighborhoods. They have written histories focusing on industrialization, economics, the labor movement, and the environmental impact the yards had on Chicago. Pacyga seeks to build on these histories by approaching his study as “the history of a place” (ix). He details the history of the yards from its beginning as a stock yard, its rise as the center of the world’s packing industry, its eventual decline and end as a stock yard, and its current reemergence as a modern industrial park. There is a saying among hog packers that they use every part of the pig except for the oink or squeal. Similarly, Pacyga utilizes numerous disciplines of history—business, institutional, technology, urban, labor, ethnic, labor, social, and local—in this study that primarily uses newspapers of the era and industry publications as sources.

For Pacyga place matters, not only for its function but also for the memories and feelings generated by it. He demonstrates this by beginning his history of the yards not as just an industrial site but also as a tourist attraction. For many of the estimated fifty thousand tourists who visited Chicago in 1889, the yards were a major draw. Into the early twentieth century, the yards remained a leading tourist attraction, a necessary campaign stop for politicians, and a destination for visiting foreign dignitaries. According to Pacyga, the yards presented a modern spectacle of “industrial pageantry” (5). In a bit of not-so-subtle imagery, while Pacyga takes readers through a tourist’s visit through the yards, he also describes in detail the journey of livestock from their arrival at the yards to subsequent slaughter and processing into a finished meat product.

After guiding tourists and livestock through the yards, Pacyga provides a history of the area occupied by the yards from swampland outside the city to an industrial livestock center. Chapter 2 recounts the building of the yards and Packingtown and the technological advances in refrigerated railcars and canning that facilitated industrial growth. Pacyga shows that along with this growth came environmental damage and the constant danger of fire...