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

Abstract

A slim volume that adds to Dominic A. Pacyga’s extensive Chicago scholarship, Slaughterhouse: Chicago’s Union Stock Yard and the World It Made surveys the city’s meatpacking industry from its mid-nineteenth-century origins to its post–World War II demise and beyond. Although the book traces a century and a half of changes in the “Square Mile” of the Union Stock Yard on Chicago’s South Side, the focus of Slaughterhouse is the stockyards’ heyday between roughly 1880 and 1920, when meatpacking helped drive the city’s—and the nation’s—economy. That heyday, facilitated by Chicago’s status as a rail hub, is lauded in chapters 1–4. Chapter 5 affords comparatively less attention to the stockyards’ Depression-era struggles and postwar collapse, which was driven in part by industrial decentralization that highway trucking made possible. The concluding chapter surveys the innovative businesses populating the industrial park that rose from the stockyards’ ashes in the 1990s, propped up by tax increment financing schemes.