Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/842307
LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 7.17 65 break. Hoots and hollers. Time for a ciga- rette. e kill floor workers hose off their blood-splattered boots while the cut floor workers stomp through a foamy lake of san- itizing solution. For now, the line is quiet. With sky-blue hairnets still perched on their heads like thought clouds, workers flow in and out of the 300,000-square-foot building, a brick monolith since the 1960s. First it was Armour Meatpacking until it was bought by Monfort, then Swift. In 2007 it became JBS, which is the world's largest processor of beef and pork. What was once a Brazilian dream — creator José Batista Sobrinho (JBS) was only processing five head of livestock per day in 1953 before he began buying out this and that company — is now a worldwide operation. In the 1800s, this little section of Louisville east of downtown swarmed with German immigrants and their butcheries, inns, tanneries and lard-rendering facilities. Butchers owned the big brick houses up and down Story Avenue; all the bigwig pig (and cow) people had a monopoly on meat and mortar. Butchertown set up shop here for several reasons: the area got the first pick of livestock coming down what was then the Shelbyville Turnpike; the proximity to downtown buyers (butchering was out- lawed in the city center to avoid the mess and scramble of market days, when farmers hauled in livestock to be sold); Beargrass Creek was a nearby dumping ground for unused parts. People called the creek water running red "Blood Creek." Some folks waded in to collect scraped fat for can- dle-making. Eventually, a large section of the creek was considered an urban hazard and buried under concrete. Folks have been buying up and remodel- ing the cheap shotgun houses and historic brownstones with their iron fences that, on market days, were a line of defense against pigs in the rosebushes. Hip businesses bloom at this end-of-the-line convergence of the Highlands, Clifton and NuLu. Butchertown Market sells chocolates made with solar power, local goodies and home decor; Butchertown Grocery feeds you a high-end meal while jazz plays in Lola, the speakeasy-style lounge upstairs; visitors taste brandy in the bright-orange distillery Copper & Kings; music thumps inside the nightclub Play. What's more: the plan for a new Louisville City FC 10,000-seat soccer stadium and, with it, more shops and restaurants. People used to call Beargrass Creek "Blood Creek." Folks would wade into the water running red to collect scraped fat for candle-making. hats (longer-tenured employees), who are all watched over by the yellow hats (quality control) and red hats (safety) and blue hats (supervisors) and green hats (managers) and light-green hats (union stewards), while the gray hats (mechanics) run around and keep everything running. Tim Miller, a mechanic, says, "It's like any other job: Some days it's great, some days you might have to lay in the blood." e loud machine with its many con- veyer belts — lines running up or down or level — prevents much conversation. e array of nationalities complicates commu- nication further. Immigrants account for some 30 percent of the plant's employees, the majority speaking Spanish, but also French, Russian, Vietnamese, Burmese, Creole and even a Congolese dialect called Ewe. Occasionally the plant manager walks the floor, pats backs. Supervisors "cut up" with each other. Mostly, eyes stare forward and focused. e workers have job titles like "hog opener" (a "bracket five" job, meaning greater physical intensity and higher pay — roughly $20 an hour versus the $14 baseline) and "pull leaf lard" (removing tissue from the area around the lungs) and "bung dropper" (removing the rectum). Cold fog billows from the two be- low-freezing chambers where the pigs chill for 24 hours before wheeling to the production side. On the "cut floor," silver steps lead to silver platforms where work- ers stand side by side, sawing and shaving and removing. Knives hang from chains clipped around waists. Pigs rise from the cooler and, at the main "break table," an employee — tethered at the waist because he's handling a saw — pulls them off the gambrel and another worker separates the major parts, then sends them down the line. Conveyer belts run sideways at the waistline or in long diagonals that stretch above the head. In some places, Whizard knives — with circular blades spinning off fat — hang from cords attached to an overhead motor. Trimmed fat and skin cram conveyer rotators, land on the droopy belts underneath. Chutes drop hams down a couple stories. Water drips to keep product moist and clean. e line is in constant motion. In the administration office, a silver box with two sets of numbers on its front ticks up, up, up. One is labeled "kill," the other "cut." One second after another, the numbers rise, crossing the line from hundreds to thousands. Pig after pig after pig until It's a chilly, gray December day and the stench isn't bad yet. at odd odor — like a mix of dirty piggies and fleshy incinera- tion — sometimes swallows Butchertown. All of JBS's other U.S. slaughterhouses sit on the less-populated edges of small towns such as Beardstown, Illinois, where the population is about 5,000 people and stench is less of a problem. (JBS has dozens of U.S. plants, some of which process beef and chicken.) But a pig plant in an urban core? Amid the rise of gentrification, the war. e line draws a border around JBS's main 3½ acres with an almost $3-million assessed value. In the past, the battleground has been court, and lawsuit after lawsuit. JBS on one side of the line, the Butchertown Neighborhood Association and some residents on the other. e main fight is about keeping that stink contained, extinguished. A stinky surge prompts calls and complaints to the city's Air Pollution Control District. APCD public information officer omas Nord explains that the stink is not classified as "pollution," per se — it's not like a chemical spill that will harm you. Rather, a nuisance. Like your neighbor blasting music too loudly. "Odor is hard to pin down," Nord says. "Could get a call at 10 about a smell and one of our inspectors gets out there at 10:15 and it's gone. ere's no real device to it either. No way to measure except with the nose." A Courier-Journal analysis of companies that paid fines to APCD from 2003 through 2014 ranked JBS 10th at $114,500. (At more than $1 million in fines, No. 1 was ECKART Effect Pigments, which makes metallic coatings for everything from plas- tic casings to nail polish. It's in industrial Rubbertown.) In January, after JBS paid