yards were located on the south side of Chicago, located from 39th Street to 47th Street, from Halstead to Ashland Ave. Closing in 1971 to move to the suburbs, and eventually Kansas, the Chicago stockyards became an incredibly important part of the American industrial revolution and economy from the late 1880's through the mid 1940's. It proved to be a significant immigration attraction in the first thirty years opened, and eventually became the most important food production center for both the World War I and World War II effort ("Journal of Social History", Spring 1996). The stockyards of Chicago was the largest livestock and meat-processing center in the world, approximately one square mile in diameter. The plant was an intricate network of hundred of inter-connected buildings, all linking together into one massive complex of meat butchering and livestock slaughter. According to Leslie F. Orear, author of the essay "The Chicago Stock Yards on the Eve of the CIO", Armour and Company was the largest meat processing company in the world and held an important part in the stockyards production. The Armour and Company plant could slaughter twelve hundred hogs every hour, for approxmiatley 16 hours a day. The Armour and Company plant alone employed over 5,000 employees, an extreme amount of employees for a single company in the times. Along with Armour, many other larger meat processing companies headquarters were based in the yards, which meant that an ample amount of white-collar managers and workers worked at the Chicago stockyards as well.
             Employment in the stockyards was forever growing, and the turnover rate for employment positions was great. Roughly 50,000 people were employed in the stockyards area, slowly creating a flourishing urban community in and around the stockyards ("The Chicago Stock Yards on the Eve of the CIO", Leslie F. Orear). Twenty percent of the work force in t...