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Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/842307
66 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 7.17 a $250,000 settlement for outstanding odor fines dating to 2011, the two entities agreed to move toward a more objective five-point scale (smell rated "mild" to "very strong"), measuring with a chemical called butanal. Another fight is about space. When JBS bought a five-acre parking lot off Cabel Street for $790,000, attorney and former neighborhood association president Jon Salomon (now part-owner of Butcher- town Grocery) argued it was an illegal expansion of the plant. Nearby residents have objected to the noisy 18-wheelers' idling and emitting diesel fumes. In 2014, the Louisville Metro Board of Zoning Adjustment cited the lot as "potentially hazardous" and a "nuisance use of the property." In compliance with BOZA, JBS installed a wooden fence around the lot, did some landscaping around the site to conceal it. e judge in the case cited "hyper technical objections" to the board's approval process, leading her to conclude that the neighborhood's "problem is not with the physical modifications...but with JBS's very presence in Butchertown." Cars speed down Story Avenue seemingly without a clue of the crosswalk caution lights blinking yellow or the JBS workers going to Hall's Cafeteria, the old-school eatery that has operated across from the slaughterhouse since 1977. Inside, the walls are checkered blue and beige. Christmas decorations are strung up, the holiday fast approaching. e TV jumps from the news — Donald Trump slamming a union leader on Twitter — to e Price Is Right, everybody trying to win big money. Despite their steady union rates and overtime Saturday after Saturday, a small line of JBS workers forms at the glowing Kentucky Lottery machine. e air in the place is greasy like fried steak and sweet like banana pudding, nostalgia. It's only a few days until Hall's is set to close for good. e owners, old and tired, say the hassle and the stress is too much. A JBS worker in a Dickies jumpsuit says, "I don't know what we're gonna do. is is Swift right here. Family. I'm gonna cry." en he yells out to a worker cleaning off tables. "One more day, boo!" A JBS worker named Fred says he's been to Hall's almost every day for 25 years. He looks through the window, sees a bright-pink food truck parked out front. He says to a worker who has been here 40-plus years, "I hear it's $8.25 for one of them burgers. Gotta have a fat bankroll for that." (A burger meal at Hall's costs less than five bucks.) en: "ey're already starting. Just waiting for this place to close." When this story went to press, the conversion of the Hall's building into a pizza joint/arcade was almost complete. e property was swooped up by Andy Blieden, the real estate developer who owns neighboring Butchertown Market, the huge complex he bought 20 years ago on a feeling. "Back then, the smell was horrible. e neighborhood was rundown, kind of dead. Not a lot of action. A lot of dilapidated buildings," the self-proclaimed capitalist-pig-with-a-heart says. "Probably why I was able to buy this building so cheap." And the next and the next. On Main Street, Blieden developed a block that includes Vietnamese-inspired Pho Ba Luu and Hi-Five Doughnuts. An owner of one of the new stores in that brightly col- ored strip anonymously complains, "When are they (JBS) going to get out?" When his young son asks, "Who fizzled?" — his way of asking, "Who farted?" — he answers: "Louisville fizzled." e stink. Plant manager Eric Wal- lin says an "operational oops" — say, a box-making machine going down — can lead to "the burps." e line stops, but the pigs keep coming as scheduled, the pens full. An air-treatment system called Aquacode in the hog barns smells almost chlorinated. e ionized water technolo- gies the company uses to kill bacteria in the air are implemented on the kill floor to rinse the viscera pans and anywhere product is moving. e rendering facility has its own smell-curbing technologies. Air scrubbers stand on top of the building. "It's different than a lot of other pack- ing houses," Wallin says. "ey're usually on the outskirts of a small town or some- where where there isn't even a town nearby. We've got neighbors all around us and we've got downtown a mile away. We do more than any other plant to control the odors. If we run right and do what we're supposed to, there won't be any smell. We had a conference call again today talking about how we will report smells. Like, ev- ery time a pig farts in the yard here, I don't want to have to report it." Blieden says he's "pro Swift." "Swift was here first," he says. "I knew there was a pig slaughterhouse across the street when I bought the (Butchertown Market) build- ing." JBS leases the parking lot adjacent to one side of Butchertown Market to Blieden, so his shoppers can park there. For Blieden, this is like a line that meets in the middle, a bridge. "People draw lines," he says. "Swift could come up with a cure for cancer and people'd reject it." A truck driver named Steve slowly rolls over the tracks that railcars once used to ship hogs, past the warehouse where two artists have been commissioned by JBS to paint a mural, a sort of peace offering to the neighborhood. (Once, a JBS forklift operator walked by, told the artists: "Yeah, you're really making this place look like less of a shithole.") Steve, who declined to give his last name, started hauling livestock more than 30 years ago, back when he noticed a neighbor's big rig and work on his dad's dairy farm getting slow. A recent trip had him driving nine hours on the long line of road from a pig farm in North Carolina to JBS. At gas sta- tions and truck stops, Steve never lingers. Especially when it's hot out because there's no air-conditioning in the back. Steve spreads sawdust on the trailer bed to keep the 150-plus pigs comfortable and calm. He regularly waters the pigs down because they can't sweat and he doesn't want them to overheat. Expensive cargo at rough- ly $150 a head. JBS works with about 460 different pig producers, some large cooperatives, and most commutes — from Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee — take about four hours. Steve ignores the disgusted looks from passersby. "People look at these pigs like they're exotic animals out of the zoo, es- pecially if you're in downtown Louisville," he says. "To me, they're just what they've always been: pigs." With no space to wait in the main unloading lot, Steve parks on the side of JBS, next to the enclosed barns that border Mellwood Avenue. A hog sticks its nose through one of the hundreds of ventilation holes lining the trailer's aluminum walls. Red recycling-like bins line the ground underneath where the dead pigs roll. A full head sits in one.