With all the charm of a Gaza checkpoint, this stunning recent development sits at the south bend of the notorious Bubby Creek on the Chicago River. Upton Sinclair’s description of the place in his classic 1906 expose of the Chicago stockyards, The Jungle, is ever worth quoting at length:
“‘Bubbly Creek’ is an arm of the Chicago River, and forms the southern boundary of the yards: all the drainage of the square mile of packing houses empties into it, so that it is really a great open sewer a hundred or two feet wide. One long arm of it is blind, and the filth stays there forever and a day. The grease and chemicals that are poured into it undergo all sorts of strange transformations, which are the cause of its name; it is constantly in motion, as if huge fish were feeding in it, or great leviathans disporting themselves in its depths. Bubbles of carbonic acid gas will rise to the surface and burst, and make rings two or three feet wide. Here and there the grease and filth have caked solid, and the creek looks like a bed of lava; chickens walk about on it, feeding, and many times an unwary stranger has started to stroll across, and vanished temporarily. The packers used to leave the creek that way, till every now and then the surface would catch on fire and burn furiously, and the fire department would have to come and put it out. Once, however, an ingenious stranger came and started to gather this filth in scows, to make lard out of; then the packers took the cue, and got out an injunction to stop him, and afterward gathered it themselves. The banks of "Bubbly Creek" are plastered thick with hairs, and this also the packers gather and clean.”
Armour & Company owned the packing plants responsible for this porcine corner of Hades. Phillip Danforth Armour was a Gold Rush panhandler who had first invested in wholesale groceries before striking it richer selling meat to the US Army during the Civil War. As handsome as war profiteering proved to be, his real money came from the transportation of live hogs to Chicago’s slaughterhouses. Armour’s killing floor was an assembly line project which utilized refrigerated rail cars to ship in the doomed beasts. His other innovation was the recycling of waste products from the butchered animals (he boasted that he used “everything but the squeal”). Armour’s fortunes, it could be said, revolved around offal and ice.
He was also obsessed with unions—or rather, by their menace. In the wake of Haymarket, he assembled a militia armed with machine guns and used strikebreaking and blacklisting on anyone who dared to contest the pay, long hours, or slums he kindly bestowed on his employees in return for their labors.
In this, he differed little from most of the big American businessmen of the day. It was the 1898 chemically-treated meat scandal which really affected Armour’s rosy reputation as a civic-minded philanthropist. His was one of the meat-packing firms who were selling low-quality, adulterated beef products to the US Army during the Spanish-American war. The war pigs that had made him a million when he first started out returned to stain the rest of his life with the public suspicion that he knew exactly what he was selling. In the words of General Nelson Appleton Miles1, Armour was flogging ‘embalmed beef’ to the army and making a killing.
Until he got busted for the spoiled cows, war had been good business for Armour. His prediction that heavy Confederate losses would result in an attendant drop in pork prices made him sell when prices were high, reaping some $2 million before the Union victory saddled his competition with swine suddenly worth less than half their market value. Armour clearly had a talent for reading entrails to divine gold: banking and pork futures speculation would account for much of his $50 million wealth. Does the ghost of such canny necroeconomics add another layer to the sludge on the bed of Bubbly Creek? Does raw fear corrupt meat, breeding pathogens like an electrical charge? Abject terror in the wide hazel eyes of the cow before her death; wild, unknowing (we cruelly hope), stark and so widened as to almost overflow the socket. Is something passed along, a pledge in the spasm, a transformation in the last transformation? A column of torment beyond even the pitiless logic of those mechanized battlefields which quickly took the epithet of ‘slaughterhouses’ and whose generals were called butchers, pointing back to the first crime before Cain’s. No, there is nothing we share and nothing between us. The shape of the animal still tries to fool us with apparent similitudes, all this talk of backbones and common mammalian blood, that we even say our lesser children are like animals—but most of all that idiot dilated eye haunts us with its fatal moment, an expression that is not an expression, one that seems to plead but only rolls back, seeing without knowledge and blind to destiny, unable to realize what it was and from where it departs. So we hope.
Aristotle said animals have no souls. In 1907, A Massachusetts physician, Duncan MacDougall, calculated the weight of the human soul after weighing six people before and after death. The differential was 21 grams. Did anyone check the mass of stockyard creatures to see if the carcass was lighter after the captive bolt was shot? Did the cold caboose weight a little less than the incoming cattle cars? Into the Creek went viscera and sinew, and any residual agony left in creature kind. Intestinal islands formed in the mucoid brine, floating masses of congealed fat whose herald was Armour’s unsellable oink. Pulverized bone and pluck reflected up from the channel where children dipped their toes and sailed paper boats, then followed their fathers into the great howling plants.
Aside from the livestock and congealed labor, the other specter of the area is ground rent. City plats are Treasure Island maps invested with phantom value by the alchemy of ‘public-private partnerships’ between paid-off technocrats and rentier interests. Chicago hardly invented it, but it perfected a model of sorts. Federal moneys which first flowed in from Johnson’s Great Society to Old Man Daley’s coffers were redirected by designating valuable downtown areas as ‘blighted’ and thus worthy of Federal assistance—that is, worthy to be cleared for privatized construction projects and financial gambling, for the reaping of capital gains by rigging land value while the city rubber stamped no-bid contracts. Money has poured in again today, via the 2023 $1.7 trillion Omnibus Appropriations bill. The Army Cops of Engineers—another organization underwritten by the public purse— is contracted to clean Armour’s old environmental disaster by 2028. Bubbly Creek will then doubtless be renamed something like South Fork Terrace. New town homes will line the water, glistening like teeth.
An ‘increase in biodiversity’ is also promised. Gone will be the methane gas, menudo sediment, and winking hydrogen sulfide bubbles that once rose from the depths of a century of garbage and rotted flesh. Mussels are expected to return. Attractive foliage and tree seedlings will be planted to pretty up the shoreline. Earlier attempts to oxygenate the contaminated waters have already brought back some fish, though no one fishes there quite yet. And there is also the promise of Park District jobs to keep the place beautiful. I admit that this all sounds lovely. But the real point is to drive up property values and to secure the riverbank with the strange gated communities already cropping up around the neighborhood. This putsch will eventually join the commercial arteries of Morgan and Halsted streets, squeezing out the middle. The Orange Line elevated train has two local stops, making access to Bubbly Heights housing a cash cow for the developers, since the people of Chicago will pay the transport bills. Socialized transit costs means high rent collection for the landlord corporations and endless calls for further rail improvement, which will again paid for by a public which cannot afford to live near it anymore.
Here we pause to recall Bridgeport’s past, again made present this January with a few old words scrawled on the side of a neighborhood soul food joint. In 1997, local bigots beat a young black kid named Leonard Clark into a coma for daring to ride his bike through Bridgeport. Go on back further. During the 1919 Red Summer race riots, the future Mayor Daley’s gang, the Hamburg Athletic Club, formed a phalanx with help from the police after the murder of Eugene Williams, another black teen with boundary issues. Dr. King visited Bridgeport five times when he lived in Chicago, another provocation in Daley’s back yard. When Dick Gregory went to the neighborhood in 1968 during the Convention, he was met with a cordon of martyrs willing to sacrifice their lives for the Daley's modest bungalow and the honor of Lady Eleanor. J Edgar Hoover even tried to sic the Chicago Outfit on Gregory, proving by this outrageous piece of Mario Puzo-inspired glitz that the citizenry of Bridgeport was good enough for show but comparatively unimaginative. But the hostile takeover finally came not from black invaders and insidious Communist agitators, but from Bridgeport's own appointed interests in City Hall. Baseball bats won’t scare off private equity and even the Hamburgers would be powerless before a bank foreclosure. And perhaps the land never forgives or forgets, as if it were almost aware of distortions in the man-made calculus of phantom land values, ever creating the conditions for a human irony which only becomes apparent after it is too late.
Lobbing bricks was starting to become passé even as far back as 1900. Restrictive covenants, red lining, and blockbusting were the highly effective measures used by the Chicago Real Estate Board to keep out Blacks, not burning crosses and rope. Proudly liberal University of Chicago funded the legal defense of these apartheid provisions until the Supreme Court struck them down (with the full support of former Klansman, Justice Hugo Black). It was always easy to point the finger at narrow, lawless, racist, working class Bridgeport. All the while, calmer souls were clearing the projects to make room for condos, strangling the West and South sides, and culling jobs from Madison Street to Calumet. The liberal elite that still keep Chicago a set of racially solid cantons operate with their own brand of subtlety, speaking always of ‘development’ and ‘community’ and ‘sustainability’ while maintaining the old rules of the game through comprador agents and purchasing power. Daley's Dan Ryan expressway, founded in 1961, has proven a far more potent physical barrier than a street corner full of armed thugs. Optics are everything. To seal the cruelest of all measures in broad daylight, it is wise to banish embarrassing shadows. No doubt a few old men still cherish the memory of stone in their hands, but do they ever feel like they've been cheated?
All cities are divided into zones, official and unofficial. In Chicago, certain areas are allocated for outward violence. Security concerns serve property values. So do myths. Here, the violence of official power acts as soft power via lawful austerity (denial of TIFF subsidies, lack of police coupled with lack of control over these security forces, gutting of schools and hospitals). In more affluent zones, the crude violence of the street is a gaudy aberration. Its audacity serves as a generator of paranoias, an exhilarating ‘mistake’ in places where common crime fascinates a bourgeoise who remain permanent spectators in the city. It is almost seems like the singular violent event is orchestrated, managed—a serial ingredient in property manipulation, scare tactics for tough-on-crime demagogues, a sparkling source of legends for the American epic of Revenge and Safety First.
It is commonly said that industrial zoning was a sop to protect job losses at the crest of the great deindustrialization wave of 1985. These zones were usually relegated to poor neighborhoods, not so much to safeguard the jobs that were dying since the mid 1970s, but to hide the shame of what was left of them. As real estate devoured ever more inner city land and the white flight returned from the terminal nowhere of the suburbs, the housing projects and the remnant of goods and services production were now surrounded by desirable land. In the end, the ‘repurposing’ of industrial-zoned land simply means the privatization of it. A zone is a liquid entity, knowing change and collapse and rebirth, an ooze of constant mutations like Upton Sinclair’s living quagmire of Bubby Creek.
Cougle Foods is in the poultry business and has been since 1873. A snaky non-profit with the official-sounding name of the Metropolitan Planning Council has decried the fact that the ‘community’ was not consulted by the chicken baron before it moved into Bubbly Creek2. Which community do they mean? The tone of their argument is that certain aldermen and the Parks District have been captured by a powerful local interest, pushing through the project as a done deal via archaic zoning legislation which will force a fowl processing monstrosity on locals. The serene evening stroll along the sculped riverbank will now be shattered by the squawk of Frankenstein's chickens and the stench of a great mechanized barnyard. The horrors of Bubbly Creek’s past are recounted to paint a picture of a ghastly plot to reverse time, then contrasted with aseptic renderings showing 'aspirational use' as part of a 'visioning process' undertaken by the MPC which will transform the contested flank of Bubbly Creek into something resembling the potted psychosis of a Logan's Run remake. Can we allow Cougle and its cursed varmints to ruin paradise? ‘Green’ is the watchword3.
Most of the industrial zones have shed their industry long ago. In working class neighborhoods, production is represented by boarded up and decaying husks next to the boarded-up and decaying corner stores and retail outlets. Ironic fact: only in gentrified areas are the names of old manufacture still present, sometimes even their old facades. Small factories are turned into concert venues (Morton Salt), the appendage of ‘Yards’ or the addition of ‘Gardens’ and ‘Park’ is added for sanitary reasons. Railroad tracks once clanging with Armour’s cars are now leafy urban ‘trails’ (the sentimental pioneer spirit is always with us, has more staying power than Armour’s bitter modernism). Memories of real production inspire metallic public statuary, the names of craft brews, the desiccated tropes of a city which always tells it like it is, straight talking and up-front, direct and says what’s on it’s mind… No, just the bankruptcy of words, zones of nostalgia and vice, psychological maneuvering, rigged games.
Farther south down the river, still part of historical Bubbly Creek, sits another development. It is finished and inhabited, plainly looking to expand. Sitting at the end of a newbuilt cul-de-sac which cuts it off from the prole cottages still characterizing much of the Daley dynasty’s withered heartland, it catches you unawares. Inside, we find mesh-enclosed personal basketball courts and security cameras, huge front windows that look like showroom display cases for the quickly constructed, occasionally ostentatious, prefab town houses. Walking through these streets, anyone from outside feels immediately like a trespasser. Proceed with Caution, Beware of the Dog, Premises Under 24 Hour Surveillance—You have been warned, signs posted, seen in the light. Have we come upon a hidden laboratory making cannibalistic vegetation or a mock-up of Musk’s idiotic Mars colony? No one goes out at night in this suspicious little subsection, which makes the whole enclave seem like a gift from city planning to serial killers. Eerie lights illuminate small yellowish patches in the black scrim; people you cannot see stare out secretly, afraid of what your fear might make them do. I have not yet seen the private security cars prowl down the asphalt, but surely they are here.
On the warm summer breeze, you can still catch the unmistakable fragrance of meat in Bubbly Creek and environs. The bloodsucker can now cross running water, and he has issued a clear invitation to the dance.
General Miles apparently had no problem with sending men into meat grinders but demanded they at least should be able to eat well first. His name was notorious for the 1877 Northern Plains massacres after the Indians removed the ridiculous Custer at Little Big Horn. Despite this—or perhaps because of it—one of a long list of atrocities which stretched out to the Trail of Tears, Miles was later known as a ‘liberal’ when it came to colonial policy (genocide). Such footnotes can go on forever in the history of this land, grinning up from the bottom in gory lines. Each one a roll call of names outrageous and mild, colossal and obscure, crimes streaming out behind them like their futures once held the promise of crimes to come. To single out one name seems unfair—and who would play the apostle of equality here?—but only because we admit to a small portion of shame, even a slight nervousness about our decency, in order to sleep more soundly in that ‘screaming men call silence’.
Consider extract from the MPC’s website: “Cougle Foods was presented to the community as the best possible fit for an existing vacant industrial site within a Planned Manufacturing District, but zoning changes in PMDs are not unheard of. In fact, the Kinzie Industrial Corridor Framework Plan, adopted in May 2019, reflected significant changes in planning, zoning, and land uses in Fulton Market as it transitioned from a meat-packing district to a commercial, corporate, and dining hub. These changes were factors in Cougle seeking to relocate from the Kinzie Corridor to Bubbly Creek.” Fulton Market has ‘transitioned’, like Caitlyn Jenner? So do the the fruits of development fall and such is the natural (housing market-driven) order of things. Here are Acts of God—or rather, Citadel LLC, which is mightier than God. The full article is worth reading for its marvelous language alone:
https://www.metroplanning.org/news/10261/Yesterdays-zoning-Chicken-processing-facility-flies-under-the-radar
Note: The MPC was actually founded in 1934 to promote and plan public housing. It was instrumental in forming the Chicago Housing Authority and it helped commission the first public housing projects in the city, as well as passing the first housing codes in Chicago. The current MPC chair is Paul Carlisle, whose former employers include Wintrust Bank, JP Morgan Chase, American National, and Bank One.
The use of parkland as a dagger to sever working class neighborhoods from the wealthy developments adjoining them, as cordons sanitaires for the class warfare of hedge-fund owned housing and doodad boutiques, is most glaring in Chicago’s Hyde Park, home of the University of Chicago. Leopold & Loeb’s old alma mater has its own verdant Dan Ryan spanning 59th to 60th Streets. Higher learning moves like the forest of Dunsinane and is capable of doing absolutely anything to keep its crown. City parks are also rented out to the organizers of insipid but profitable gated public events, none of the proceeds of which enter into any local circulation. The best that can be hoped for is that the promoters clean up the mess afterward. Major private forces have long set their eyes on the parks and the lakefront (George Lucas was only the latest, and the great gob of concrete phlegm he wanted to build lakeside was by far the most grotesque). See also, R. Fitch, The Assassination of New York and Robert Caro’s The Power Broker.