Blood on the Floor

In eighteen eighty-three, a group of investors built the Union Stock Yards of Omaha in South Omaha, a town that was then separate from the city proper. What followed was an industrial transformation measured in blood and tonnage. By eighteen ninety, Omaha's stockyards ranked third in the nation, behind Chicago and Kansas City, but they were climbing.

By the early twentieth century, the big four meatpackers, Armour, Swift, Cudahy, and Wilson, all operated massive slaughter and processing plants in South Omaha. In nineteen fifty-five, Omaha surpassed Chicago to become the largest livestock market and meat packing center in the world. In that year, Omaha was the only city on earth where all four of those companies slaughtered cattle, hogs, and sheep under the same sky.

At its peak in the late nineteen fifties, industries tied to the stockyards employed roughly half of all Omaha's working people. The Livestock Exchange Building, built in nineteen twenty-six and still standing, served as the central trading floor, a red-brick tower that looked more like a bank than a slaughterhouse, because in many ways it functioned like one.

The industry built the south side of the city: the bars, the boarding houses, the Czech and Polish and Mexican neighborhoods that grew up around the work. It also built a generation of union struggles that stretched across much of the twentieth century.

The stockyards closed in nineteen ninety-nine, after one hundred and sixteen years of operation. The industry had shifted toward rural feedlot towns where labor costs were lower. What remains is the Exchange Building, now converted to offices, and the neighborhood streets that still carry the geometry of an industrial city that once processed millions of animals a year.