The Union Stock Yard & amp; Transit Co. , or The Yards , was a meatpacking district in Chicago for more than a century, beginning in 1865. The district was operated by a group of railway companies that acquired a swamp and transformed it into a centralized processing area. In the 1890s, the railway money behind the Union Stockyards was Vanderbilt money. Union Stockyards operates in the New Town community area for 106 years, helping Chicago to be known as the "world's pigsters" and the center of the meat packing industry for decades.
Cattle storage became the focal point for the emergence of some of the earliest international companies. These companies are refining new industry innovations and affecting financial markets. Both the district's revival and the downfall owe a fortune to the evolution of transportation and technology services in America. Stock gardens have become an integral part of Chicago's popular culture of history.
From the Civil War to 1920 and culminating in 1924, more meat was processed in Chicago than anywhere else in the world. Construction began in June 1865 with an opening on Christmas Day in 1865. The Yards closed at midnight on Friday, July 30, 1971, after decades of decline during the decentralization of meat packing industry. The Union Stock Yard gate was designated as a Chicago Landmark on 24 February 1972, and a National Historic Landmark on May 29, 1981.
Video Union Stock Yards
History
Prior to the construction of various private storage areas, the owners of the tavern provide pasture and care for cattle waiting to be sold. With a railway deployment service, several small storage areas are made in and around Chicago City. In 1848, a stockpile called the Bulls Head Market opened to the public. The Bulls Head Stock Yards is located on Madison Street and Ogden Avenue. In subsequent years, several small storage areas were scattered throughout the city. Between 1852 and 1865, five (5) railroads were built into Chicago. The stockyards that are popping up are usually built along the various railways of the new railroad companies. Some railroads build their own storage in Chicago. Central Illinois and Central Michigan railway centers are combined to build the largest pen set on the lake edge east of Cottage Grove Avenue from 29th Street to 35th Street. In 1878, the New York Central Railroad managed to buy a controlling stake on the Michigan Central Railroad. In this way, Cornelius Vanderbilt, owner of New York Central Railroad, started his career in the storage business in Chicago.
Several factors contributed to the consolidation of the Chicago stockyard: railroad expansion westward between 1850 and 1870, which spurred massive commercial growth in Chicago as a major railway center, and the Mississippi River blockade during the Civil War that closed all north-south river trade. The United States government buys a lot of beef and pork to feed Union troops who fought against the Civil War. As a result, pigs' acceptance on the Chicago bourse increased from 392,000 pigs in 1860 to 1,410,000 pigs during the winter-discharging season of 1864-1865; during the same period of time, the acceptance of beef in Chicago increased from 117,000 to 339,000. With the inclusion of butchers and the issue of small meat packing, the number of businesses is greatly increased to process the flood of livestock sent to Chicago storage. The goal is to cut and process livestock locally rather than moving it to other towns in the north for cutting and processing. Keeping with the large numbers of animals arriving every day proved impossible until a new wave of consolidation and modernization changed the meatpacking business in the post-Civil War era.
The Union Stock Yards, designed to consolidate operations, was built in 1864 in the southern marshes city. It's south and west from the previous stock yard in an area bounded by Halsted Street to the east, South Racine Avenue to the west, with 39th Street as the northern boundary and 47th Street as the southern boundary. Led by Alton, Chicago & amp; St. Louis Railroad and Lake Shore and the Michigan Southern Railway, a consortium of nine railroad companies (hence the name "Union") acquired a 320 acre (1.3 km km ) swamp area in southwest Chicago for $ 100,000 1864. The gardens are connected to the city's main rail line 15 miles (24 km) from the track. In 1864, Union Stock Yards was located outside the southern boundary of Chicago City. Within five years the area was incorporated into the city.
Finally, 375 hectares (1.52 km 2 ) site has 2300 separate cattle sheds, space to hold 75,000 pigs, 21,000 cows and 22,000 sheep at a time. In addition, hotels, salons, restaurants and offices for traders and brokers have sprung up in the growing community around the livestock. Led by Timothy Blackstone, founder and first president of Union Stock Yards and Transit Company, "The Yards" experienced tremendous growth. Processing two million animals annually in 1870, in two decades this number increased to nine million in 1890. Between 1865 and 1900, some 400 million livestock were slaughtered within the boundaries of the Yards.
At the beginning of the 20th century, livestock storage employs 25,000 people and produces 82 percent of domestic meat consumed nationally. In 1921, livestock storage employs 40,000 people. Two thousand people work directly for Union Stock Yard & amp; Transit Co., and the rest work for companies such as packing meat, which has factories in livestock storage. In 1900, the 475-acre plot (1.92 km 2 ) had a 50-mile (80 km) road, and had a 130-mile (210 km) trajectory along its perimeter. At its largest size, The Yards covered almost 1 square mile (3 km 2 ) of land, from Halsted Street to Ashland Avenue and from 39th (now Pershing Rd.) To 47th Streets.
At one time, 500,000 gallons of US (2,000 m 3 ) a day of Chicago River water pumped into storage. So much waste storage is flowed into the South Fork river called Bubbly Creek due to decomposition gas products. Bubble river to this day. When the City permanently reversed the flow of the Chicago River in 1900, its purpose was to prevent the Stock Yards waste product, along with other waste, from flowing into Lake Michigan and polluting the city's drinking water.
The meatpacking district was served between 1908 and 1957 by the Chicago 'L' short line with several stops, aimed primarily at the daily transportation of thousands of workers and even tourists to the site. The line was built when the City of Chicago forced the transfer of surface trajectory at 40th Street.
The development of transportation and distribution methods led to a decline in business and the closing of Union Stock Yards in 1971. The National Wrecking Company negotiated a contract in which the National Wrecking cleared the 102-acre site and moved about 50 hectares of animal cages, additional buildings and eight Story Exchange Buildings. It took about eight months to complete the work and set up the site for the construction of an industrial park.
Industrial effects
The size and scale of storage, along with technological advances in rail transport and cooling, enable the creation of some of the first global companies in America led by entrepreneurs such as Gustavus Franklin Swift and Philip Danforth Armor. Philip Armor was the first to build a modern large-scale meatpacking plant in Chicago in 1867. The Armor plant was built on 45th Street and Elizabeth Avenue immediately to the west of the Union Stockyards. The new plant uses modern "assembly line" work methods (or rather a dis-assembly line). The mechanical process with its killer wheel and conveyor helped inspire the assembly line of cars popularized by Henry Ford in 1913. For a while the Armor factory, located on twelve (12) acre sites, is famous as the world's largest factory.
In addition, hedging transactions by goods-stock companies are critical in the formation and growth of commodity exchanges and futures markets based in Chicago. Selling in futures markets allows sellers to have a guaranteed price at a specified time in the future. This is very helpful for sellers who expect their cattle or pigs to come to the market by feeding the cattle or other pigs when the price may be much lower than the guaranteed futures price.
Upon Armor's arrival in 1867, the company Gustav Swift arrived in Chicago in 1875 and built another modern large-scale meat processing factory on 42nd Street and South Justine Street. The Morris Company built a packing factory on 42nd Street and Elizabeth Street. The Hammond Company and Wilson Company also built a meat packing plant in the western area of ​​Chicago's stockyard. Finally, wrapping meat with leather-side products, soaps, fertilizers, glue (such as a large glue factory located at 44th Street and Loomis Street), drugs, imitation ivory, gelatin, shoe polish, buttons, perfume, and violin straps succeed in the neighborhood. In addition, there is a "Hair Factory," located on 44th Street and Ashland Avenue, which processes hair from animals slaughtered into items that can be sold.
In addition to Union Stock Yards, the International Amphitheater building was built on the west side of Halsted Street on 42nd Street in the 1930s, initially to hold annual annual Live Stock Exposures beginning in 1900. It became the venue for many national conventions.
Historian William Cronon concludes:
- Due to Chicago packing, ranchers in Wyoming and Iowa fattening farmers regularly find a reliable market for their animals, and on average receive better prices for the animals they sell there. At the same time and for the same reason, Americans of all classes find more and better meat on their tables, purchased on average at lower prices than before. Seen from this angle, the packed "rigid economic system" looks very good.
Fire
The Chicago Union Stock Yards Fire began on December 22, 1910, destroying $ 400,000 of property and killing twenty-one firefighters, including Fire Marshal James J. Horan. Fifty machine companies and seven hook and ladder companies battled the fire until it was extinguished by Chief Seyferlich on December 23. In 2004, a memorial to all the dead Chicago firefighters in duty was established just behind the United Stock Yards Gate at the intersection of Exchange Avenue and Peoria Street.
Greater fires occurred on Saturday, May 19, 1934, which burned nearly 90% of storage, including exchange buildings, livestock sheds, and International Livestock Expo buildings. This larger fire is seen as far as Indiana, and causes damage of about $ 6 million. While only one guard was killed, some livestock were also killed, but the yard was in business on Sunday the following night.
Workers and unions
After the opening of a new Union Stockyards on December 25, 1865, a community of workers began living in the area west of the packing plant between Ashland Avenue and South Robey Street and bordered north with 43rd Street and to the south with 47 Roads. At first, the inhabitants were very Irish and German - 60% Irish and 30% German. Officially designated "Lake City" until its incorporation into the City of Chicago in about 1870, the neighborhood was known locally as "Packingtown." However, much later in the 1930s, the community would be known as "Back of the Yards."
The incredible sensation about the environment is the community smell caused not only by the packing plant located directly to the east but also by the 345-acre Chicago Union Stock Yards which contains 2,300 animal cages, further east of the packing plant.
Back of the Yards Community
The settlement in the area to be known as "Back from the Yard" began in the 1850s before there was packing of meat or livestock in the area. At this time the area is known as "Lake City." Indeed, the area will continue to be called the Lake City until 1939. See that the regional newspaper is called the Town of Lake Journal. Only with the establishment of a community organization called "Back of the Yards Neighborhood Neighborhood Council" in 1939, the western and southern environment of meat packing began to be called "Back of the Yards." That is the name claimed by the inhabitants as their own. In 1939, Town of Lake Journal officially changed its name to Back of the Yards Journal .
Pioneers to the area that was first called "Lake City" were S. S. Crocker and John Caffrey. Indeed, Crocker earned the nickname "The Father of Lake City." In February 1865 the area was officially included as a "Lake City" area that still consisted of less than 700 people. In the early 1860s the meat packing industry in the United States was still located in Cincinnati, Ohio, the original "Porkopolis" of the Pre-Civil War era. However, with the end of the American Civil War, the meat packing industry began to move west along with the westward migration of the population of the United States. For the meat packing industry that moves west means coming to Chicago. In early 1827, Archibauld Clybourn had established himself as a butcher in a wood-cutting house in the northern branch of the Chicago River and supplied most of it to Fort Dearborn garrisons. Another small butcher came later. In 1848, Bull's Head Stockyard began operations on Madison Street and Ogden Avenue on the West Side of Chicago. However, this initial storage operation still means holding and feeding cattle and pigs while transiting to a meatpacking plant east of Indianapolis and, of course, Cincinnati.
Maps Union Stock Yards
Reject and current use
The prosperity of livestock storage is due to the concentration of railroads and the evolution of refrigerated rail cars. The decline is due to further progress in transportation and post-World War II distribution. Direct sales of livestock from breeders to packers, facilitated by advances in interstate trucks, make it cheaper to slaughter animals where they are raised and excluded as intermediary hoard places. At first, the big meat-packing companies resisted the change, but Swift and Armor surrendered and emptied their plants at Yard in the 1950s.
In 1971, the area bounded by Pershing Road, Ashland, Halsted, and 47th Street became The Stockyards Industrial Park. The environment in the west and south industrial parks is still known as the Back of the Yards, and is still home to a growing immigrant population.
Gate
The rest of the Union Yard Stock Gate is still curving above Exchange Avenue, next to a fire monument, and can be seen by those driving along Halsted Road. This limestone gate, marking the entrance to a livestock storage, survives as one of the few legacy heritage of Chicago cattle and meat packaging. The steering wheel above the center arch is considered to represent "Sherman," a prize-winning bull named after John B. Sherman, founder of Union Stock Yard and Transit Company. The gate is a designated US National Historic Landmark.
In popular culture
In 1906 Upton Sinclair published The Jungle , revealing the dreadful conditions in the livestock storage area early in the 20th century. These zoos are mentioned in the Carl Sandburg poem Chicago : "proud to be the Butcher Hog, Toolmaker, Wheat Stacker, Player by Train and Carrier to the Nation." Frank Sinatra mentioned his 1964 song "My Kind of Town," and the stockyards accepted the mention in the opening chapter of Thomas Pynchon's novel Against the Day. James Skip's song "Hard Times Killing floor blues" refers to the nickname of the slaughtering section of the depository during the great depression of the 1930s. The Yards is a major tourist attraction, with visitors like Rudyard Kipling, Paul Bourget, and Sarah Bernhardt. The Saint Joan drama of Stockyards, a version of Joan of Arc's story by Bertolt Brecht takes place in the storeroom. Movie 1950 Union Station with William Holden has the last scene on Union Stockyards. In the "Rose Fights Back", a 1989 episode of The Golden Girls, Rose Nyland reveals that she and her husband, Charlie, partied on a trip to the Chicago Stock Yards as a romantic trip for their 20th Anniversary.
See also
- Chicago Board of Trade
- Chicago Mercantile Exchange
Note
Bibliography
External links
- "File History" History of Chicago Society
- The Meter's History in A Biography of America
- Chicago Stockyards Industrial Park Photos at Newberry Library
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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