NEW YORK– When John Jobbagy’s grandfather emigrated from Budapest in 1900, he joined a crowd of European butchers chopping and shipping meat in a noisy, smelly corner of Manhattan that New Yorkers called the Meatpacking District.
Today, only a handful of meatpackers remain, and they’re preparing to say goodbye to a very different neighborhood, known more for its high-end boutiques and expensive restaurants than for the industry that gave it its name.
Jobbagy and the other tenants of the District’s last meat market have accepted a deal from the city to relocate so the building can be occupied. redevelopedthe culmination of a decades-long transformation.
“The neighborhood I grew up in is just memories,” said Jobbagy, 68. “It has been gone for more than 20 years.”
In its heyday, it was a gritty hub of more than 200 slaughterhouses and packing plants at the intersection of shipping and train lines, where meat and poultry were unloaded, cut and rushed to markets. Now the docks are recreational areas and is an abandoned freight line the High Line park. The Whitney Museum of American Art moved from Madison Avenue next to Jobbagy’s meat company in 2015.
Some of the new retailers hold memories of the neighborhood’s meatpacking past. At the brick entrance of an outlet of fashion brand Rag & Bone, which sells $300 worth of leather belts, is a carefully restored sign from a previous resident, “Dave’s Quality Veal,” in red-and-white hand-painted lettering.
Another sign for a meat wholesaler appears on a long awning outside Samsung’s US flagship store.
But the neighborhood no longer sounds, smells or feels like the place where Jobbagy started working for his father in the late 1960s. He worked through the summers of high school and college before starting his own business.
At the time, meatpackers kept bottles of whiskey in their lockers to stay warm in the refrigerated facilities. Outside, “it smelled,” he said, especially on hot days near the poultry houses, where chicken juice flowed onto the street.
People visited the area only when they had business, usually through handshake deals, he said.
Slowly but surely, meatpacking plants began closing or moving out of Manhattan as advances in refrigeration and packaging allowed the meat industry to consolidate around packing plants in the Midwest, many of which can slaughter and produce more than 5,000 steers per day. packaged and sent directly to supermarkets.
From the 1970s onwards, a new nightlife emerged as bars and nightclubs emerged, many of which catered to the LGBTQ+ community. Sex clubs and slaughterhouses coexisted. And as the decades passed, the drag queens and club kids began to make way for fashion designers and restaurateurs.
In 2000, “Sex and The City” character Samantha had left her Upper East Side apartment for a new home in the Meatpacking District. In the show’s final 2003 season, she was furious when she saw that a Pottery Barn was going to open near a local leather bar.
Another turning point came with the 2009 opening of the High Line, on a defunct rail line originally built in the 1930s. The popular Greenway is now flanked by hotels, galleries and luxury apartment buildings.
Jobbagy said his father died five years before the opening and he would be amazed at what it looks like now.
“If I had told him the elevated railway was going to be turned into a public park, he would never have believed it,” he said.
But the area has been constantly changing, noted Andrew Berman, executive director of local architectural preservation group Village Preservation.
“It wasn’t always a meatpacking district. Before that it was kind of a wholesale district, and before that it was a shipping district,” Berman said. Fort Gansevoort stood there in the early 19th century. ‘So it has had many lives and will continue to have new lives. ”
While an exact eviction date for the final meat market has not yet been set, some other businesses will move elsewhere.
Not Jobbagy, which has survived by supplying top restaurants and the few stores that still want fresh hanging meat. He retires along with his brother and his employees, mostly Latino immigrants who trained with him and saved to buy second homes in Honduras, Mexico or the Dominican Republic. Some want to move to other industries, in other states.
He expects that he will be the last meat packer standing when the cleaver finally falls on the Gansevoort Market.
“I’ll be here when this building closes, when everyone, you know, goes off to do something else,” Jobbagy said. “And I’m glad I was a part of it and didn’t leave sooner.”