David Witter

Just past dawn, as the sky turns from purple to orange, a semi-trailer sits at a loading dock at 3900 South Emerald, a stones throw from the White Sox ballpark and the Dan Ryan Expressway. The driver rolls up the gate and looks into a series of wooden pens, filled with more than 1,500 lambs trucked in through the night from Nebraska, Iowa and Colorado. As the lambs quietly munch hay under dim naked bulbs, the driver jumps out and herds the animals out of the pens. The lambs run into the trailer as a single grayish mass. Once filled, the truck pulls away, heading towards the main plant and the "killing floor" at 3810 South Halsted. Forty years ago, this same truck would have passed dozens of others, also filled with cattle, hogs, and sheep on their way to and from the Chicago stockyards. Today it travels past brand-new $400,000 townhomes and condominiums.

The truck belongs to Chiappetti Lamb and Veal, Chicago's last slaughterhouse. Over the last 75 years, this family-run business has survived competition from the giants like Armour and Swift, the closing of the Chicago stockyards, and major changes in the American diet. Now it faces a new battle: the revitalization of the Bridgeport and Back of the Yards area. This development is transforming the neighborhood from a working-class bastion, through a short stint as an artists and students haven, to a gleaming example of the "new Chicago." But just as it withstood the giant packinghouses, and the more recent vanishing of the left-wing bookstores, curio shops, and ethnic diners along nearby South Halsted, the Chiappettis have a plan to both relocate and preserve a part of Chicago's history.

Chiappetti started as a family farm in what is now Orland Park, trucking in lamb and selling it wherever they could.

"We used to have to bid against the big companies like the Armours, Swifts and Wilsons," says Franco Chiappetti, who represents the fourth generation working at the company. "They called people like us alley rats."

Company founder Fiore Chiappetti eventually established his own butcher shop and slaughterhouse. Located close to Greektown, the Jewish enclave near Maxwell Street and the Italian neighborhoods on Taylor Street and 25th and Oakley, the business found a small niche selling lamb and veal to European immigrants.

At that time Chicago was busy maintaining its reputation as "Hog Butcher of the World," with beef coming in a close second. Made famous by Carl Sandburg's poem, and infamous by books like "The Jungle" and Howlin' Wolf's "The Killing Floor," the Chicago stockyards were a place where products like hooves, hides, bones and brains--"everything but the squeal"--was put to commercial use. In their heyday, they employed 40,000 people, processed 9 million animals a year, and had 500,000 gallons of fresh water pumped in daily from the Chicago River. Still referred to by the locals as "bubbly creek," the Chicago River was reversed in 1900 in part because of the decomposing waste and byproducts from the stockyards.

"When I was a kid all I remember seeing was livestock and people in white coats," says Dennis Chiappetti, who has worked in the family business since the early sixties. "It was like a little city unto itself, with hundreds of trucks, trains and, of course, the smell dominating the neighborhood."

Old-time Chicagoans can still remember that odor. I smelled it once and will never forget it. Imagine taking two packages of bacon and letting them rest on the counter for a couple of sunny days. Slice open the plastic wrappers and let them sit in the refrigerator for another day, open the fridge, and you might get an idea of the stench that overpowered neighborhoods like Bridgeport, Back of the Yards and, on hot summer nights, as far north as Lincoln Park.

This is just part of the lore of the stockyards as told by veterans like Dennis Chiappetti and Rabbi Abraham Siegel. Siegel, who at 80 still works part-time as a kosher butcher at Chiappetti, has been employed at the stockyards for more than sixty years.

"When I first came here in 1940, the stockyards stretched from Ashland west to Halsted and from 39th south to 47th Street, and they used to drive the cattle on horses," Siegel, who was born in Lithuania but lived in Palestine until 1939, says. "I started working at Swift, and have worked for Armour, Wilson and, since 1961, Chiappetti--always as a kosher butcher."

A giant of a man whose stature and rock-like handshake convey strength that belies his 80 years and a bearing that matches his Biblical name, Siegel also saw the slow and steady demise of the stockyards.

"Chicago was the center for the railroads, and cattle used to be brought in and out from all over the country by train," Siegel, who slaughters lamb by the traditional kosher method two days a week, says. "Trucks changed everything. They can go to any little town any time, and you don't need tracks. So now most of the big slaughterhouses are in small towns, where there is more space and cheaper land."

Although some smaller companies like AMPAC and Lincoln Meats stuck around, most of the major stockyard players were gone by 1972. Due perhaps to its small size, Chiappetti held on as well. In the beginning it was easier, as lamb and lamb chops were a regular part of the American diet. "Twenty-five years ago it was not only the tradition for first-generation Serbs, Greeks and Italians to have lamb on Sundays, but your average Americans ate some 284 million pounds of lamb a year," Franco Chiappetti says.

But starting in the mid-eighties, lamb began to disappear from America's tables. Once again, the Chiappettis adapted. "We still had a little niche in the local ethnic market, relationships with stores like Dominick's and Jewel, and a lot of kosher butcher shops and local restaurants who have been our customers for years," Chiappetti says.

"Now stores like Jewel have become part of nationwide chains, but you can still get our products at stores like Treasure Island, Butera, kosher delicatessens and gourmet stores where we offer not only fresh lamb but pre-packaged, "case ready" roasts and veal sausages."

Chiappetti survived the death of the stockyards and the health-food era, but can they beat the march of time and "city hall"? Today, the blocks of Halsted between 3000 and 3200 South have been torn down, leveled, and are fenced off, awaiting construction. Just two years ago, they were filled with businesses like Augustine's Spiritual Goods, a bookstore that specialized in Marxist literature and other shops that may remind some more of Wicker Park than Bridgeport. In January of 2003, business owners like Augustine's Frank Steele Pulaski, formerly located at 3114 South Halsted, began receiving letters, then legal eviction notices stating that the city was taking the property under "eminent domain."

"They say that they are taking the property to build a new police station," says Pulaski, whose shop sold candles, incense and charms used in voodoo, Santa Ria, and other ritual ceremonies. "If they do build a police station, fine, but I have a feeling that this is all part of a much grander, larger scheme."

Pulaski, whose shop also offered astrological services, may have been psychic, a savvy businessman, or both. But as he uttered these statements on a cold January day, he did so while eating a bowl of cabbage soup at Healthy Foods. At the time, Healthy Foods, at 3236 South Halsted, was not part of the original demolition. But as of this writing, there is a large red sign in the window that reads "License Suspended" after city inspectors closed it recently. Construction crews and heavy jackhammers are also tearing apart the street and sidewalk directly in front of the restaurant, while the sign that read "Future Site of Your New Police Station" has vanished.

It is under these conditions that the Chiappettis, whose business practically personifies the old, dirty Chicago that many want gone, are operating.

"I think they are planning to take this neighborhood and turn it into something like another Wrigleyville, with restaurants, bars, and condos, "Franco Chiappetti says as he walks down Emerald, just out of earshot of the baying lambs. "Comiskey is closer to downtown than Wrigley, and if you look you can see that it is also close to the expressway and not far from the lake. As developments like UIC/Maxwell Street bleed south, and the expansion of McCormick Place makes its way west, this place is a natural."

Like the UIC/Maxwell Street area, the Chiappettis once envisioned their plant operating as a new development with an old Chicago theme, including a stockyards museum. Tom Pierce, whose collection of stockyards artifacts is looking for a permanent home, talked about uniting with the Chiappettis.

"We talked about perhaps locating on the third floor of the old building," says Pierce, whose museum contains a fascinating variety of documents, photos, and memorabilia from the era. "Chiappetti's Emerald site was formerly High-Grade Beef, where slaughtering by gravity, or starting with live animals on the third floor, breaking them on the second and shipping them on the first, began."

Pierce's museum will not be located at Chiappetti's old plant because the family has negotiated with the city to relocate a few blocks away at 3800 South Morgan. The permits have already been approved and architects are working on a plan to build a new, state-of-the-art plant. The new building would put Chiappetti's pens, offices and processing plants under one roof, and allow the company to modernize. This means that while many of Bridgeport's old shops and ethnic diners may not survive the "Millennium Revolution," Chiappetti's will.

"We've survived a lot of changes and we plan to stay one step ahead," Franco Chiappetti says. "We want to work with the city to not only keep a lot of good jobs in Chicago, but also preserve a part of its history."

(2005-05-03)

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