For over a century, Chicago was, in the ubiquitous words of poet Carl Sandburg, "Hog Butcher to the World" - and the focal point of its enormous pork and cattle livestock industry centered at the Union Stock Yards. The yards and the surrounding facilities were devoted to the raising, slaughtering and packing of livestock - an industry which prompted Upton Sinclair to alarm the nation with his 1906 exposé The Jungle, sparking enduring reform in meat handling. At the Yards' heyday many employees lived in the neighborhood nearby, in "back" of the stockyards. Today the yards have been torn down, a remnant of the Stockyards Gate (pictured) their sole monument. The area they occupied now serves as an industrial park, and the surrounding Southside neighborhood is somewhat isolated.
< Detail of an ornamental steer on the historic Stockyards Gate.
