The Union Stock Yards Gate: Where Upton Sinclair Found The Jungle

For over a century, the smell hit you before you saw it. The Union Stock Yards of Chicago operated from 1865 to 1971, occupying 475 acres on the South Side. At its 1924 peak it processed about 18.6 million animals a year, earning Chicago the nickname "Hog Butcher for the World." The yards gave rise to a whole industrial ecosystem: the meatpacking giants Swift, Armour, and Wilson all built their empires here. It was conditions inside these plants — which Upton Sinclair researched here in 1904 for his 1906 novel The Jungle — that shocked the nation and led directly to the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act. Today, nearly everything is gone. Only the limestone gate of 1879 at Exchange and Peoria Streets remains, designed by Burnham and Root and carved with the head of "Sherman the Bull," the prize bull of stockyard superintendent John D. Sherman. A plaque on the gate recalls the 21 firefighters killed in the stockyards fire of 1910, and just west of it stands a memorial statue bearing their names and those of every Chicago firefighter who has died in the line of duty.