Chicago Stockyards 01 | groundwork.

This blog will start to detail the process of a semester long project in my fourth year design studio. It will cover the research, the planning and the eventual design solution to the project. The first installment is entitled groundwork and will cover the first few weeks of the project and the research done around it.

This fall our design studio is focusing on the historic Chicago Stockyards, which in its heyday was the largest meat packing plant in the United States.Today it is a bustling industrial park in the middle of one of the most diverse areas in the city. The problem about this area is that there is all of this industry in the middle of the mile-by-mile site, most of which is food production/distribution, but the neighborhoods surrounding the site, the ones built around the stockyards originally, are not a large part of this local ecosystem.

The History

As previously stated the Chicago Stockyards were the largest yards in the country, so much so that it was given the infamous nickname, "hog-butcher of the world." This title would stick until the 1950s when the industry would begin to decentralize as advances in transportation and distribution made it easier to do the work locally. The history of the Stockyards echoed throughout the area in Chicago, it has shaped the neighborhoods around it and was one of the big reasons for Chicago's population explosion.

The melting pot that formed here because of the jobs being offered at the stockyards was one of the largest in the world. Immigrants were flocking to Chicago, primarily from Europe, with Ireland and Germany being the two main groups of immigrants in 1865. The neighborhoods that have formed out of these immigrants flocking to the yards include; Back of the Yards, Canaryville and McKinley Park. The people in the neighborhoods were just as important as the people working in the Yards and had a better experience, too.

The stockyards also indirectly changed the history of food production for the better. Books like The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and Slaughterhouse by Dominic A. Pacyga, revealed the true condition of the stockyards. These conditions were borderline inhumane for people to be working in. Sinclair talks about dead rats along with children’s fingers and cow fetuses shoveled into sausage grinding machine, diseased cows slaughtered for beef, and filth and guts from the floor swept up and sold as ‘potted ham’. The workers were also worked all day with little to know breaks. Most of these workers knew that they needed to persevere through the situation because if they could not do the work there would be plenty of fresh meat (no pun intended) coming in from Europe looking for work. It took these kinds of books to truly understand what was going on in the stockyards because to most Americans the stockyards were a mystifying place.

Hearing about the severity of the conditions of the stockyards, it was quite shocking to hear that people would travel from hundreds of miles away from Chicago and come and visit the stockyards. "At the turn of the twentieth century, a reported five hundred thousand people visited the Union Stock Yard annually," Pacyga writes. Families would witness the slaughtering process in its brutal efficiency, as the stockyards "presented a compelling if somewhat frightening window to the future." It was this industrialization taking place at the stockyards, not been seen before and for most Americans, that attracted them to the Chicago and turned an industrial site into essentially a tourist destination.

Today

The site that was the home to the former stockyards is now an industrial complex home to a multitude of businesses, most of which are in fact tied to the food production industry, with 6 being tied to the meatpacking industry. What seemed like a struggling industrial park on the South side of Chicago was immediately disproved when we visited the site. There is a lot going on with tons of product being brought in and out of the site per day. For most of the studio there was an agreement that the yards has transitioned well into a new use and being used well. But there were some glaring concerns about the site that needed to be addressed.

Research