NEW YORK (AP) When John Jobbagy’s grandfather moved to Manhattan from Budapest in 1900, he joined a crowd of European butchers who were slicing up and sending off meat in what the New Yorkers termed the Meatpacking District—a noisy, odorous area of Manhattan.
Only a few meatpackers are left now, and they are getting ready to bid farewell to a completely different neighborhood that is more well-known for its upscale shops and pricey dining establishments than the sector that gave it its name.
After decades of renovation, Jobbagy and the other tenants in the district’s final meat market have agreed to vacate the building in order for it to be renovated.
“I have only memories of the neighborhood where I grew up,” Jobbagy, 68, added. It has been absent for more than two decades.
Meat and poultry were unloaded, chopped, and swiftly transported to markets at this gritty conglomerate of more than 200 slaughterhouses and packing operations at the junction of railroad and shipping lines. The docks are now parks, and the High Line Park is an abandoned freight line. In 2015, the Whitney Museum of American Art relocated from its previous location on Madison Avenue, close to Jobbagy’s meat business.
Beef hangs in the meat locker of J.T. Jobbagy Inc. in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan, Tuesday, Nov. 19, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
Image courtesy of Julia Demaree Nikhinson/Associated Press
There are remnants of the neighborhood’s meatpacking history at some of the new stores. A meticulously preserved sign from a previous occupier, Dave’s Quality Veal, with hand-painted letters in red and white, stands at the exposed brick entryway to a Rag & Bone business that sells $300 leather belts.
A lengthy building awning outside Samsung’s main phone store in the United States displays another sign for a wholesale meat supplier.
However, the area no longer has the same feel, sound, or smell as when Jobbagy started working for his father in the late 1960s. Before starting his own firm, he worked during the summers of high school and college.
To stay warm within the refrigerated factories back then, meatpackers stored bottles of whiskey in their lockers. He claimed that on hot days next to the poultry houses, where chicken juices poured into the streets, it smelled particularly bad outside.
According to him, people only came to the neighborhood with business and typically made handshake agreements.
As improvements in refrigeration and packaging allowed the meat industry to concentrate around packing plants in the Midwest, many of which could butcher and package over 5,000 steers in a day and ship straight to supermarkets, meatpacking plants gradually started to close or relocate out of Manhattan.
With the influx of pubs and nightclubs, many of which catered to the LGBTQ+ population, a new nightlife culture began to take shape in the 1970s. There were slaughterhouses and sex clubs. And as the decades passed, fashion designers and restaurateurs started to replace the drag queens and club youngsters.
Samantha, a character from Sex and the City, moved to the Meatpacking District in 2000 from her apartment on the Upper East Side. She was incensed to find a Pottery Barn planned to open close to a neighborhood leather bar by the show’s last season in 2003.
The 2009 launch of the High Line on a now-defunct rail line that was once constructed in the 1930s marked yet another significant milestone. These days, hotels, galleries, and upscale apartment complexes line either side of the well-liked greenbelt.
Jobbagy claimed that his father, who passed away five years before to the opening, would be perplexed by the current state of affairs.
He claimed that he would never have believed me if I had told him that the elevated railroad will be transformed into a public park.
However, Andrew Berman, executive director of the local architectural preservation organization Village Preservation, pointed out that the region has undergone continuous development.
The district wasn’t always known for its meatpacking. According to Berman, it had formerly been a maritime district and a wholesale produce district. Fort Gansevoort stood there in the early nineteenth century. Thus, it has lived countless lives and will continue to live new ones.
There is no specific date for the final meat market’s eviction, although some of the other businesses will go elsewhere.
Not Jobbagy, which has managed to survive by providing the few retail establishments that still demand fresh hanging meat as well as upscale dining establishments. He, his brother, and his staff—the majority of whom are Latino immigrants who trained under him and saved money for second homes in Honduras, Mexico, or the Dominican Republic—will all retire. Some wish to relocate to different states and industries.
When the cleaver finally lands on Gansevoort Market, he anticipates being the last meatpacker left standing.
“When this building closes and everyone moves on to something else, I’ll be here,” Jobbagy added. And I’m happy that I participated and didn’t depart earlier.
The Associated Press, 2024. All rights reserved. All rights reserved. It is prohibited to publish, broadcast, rewrite, or redistribute this content without authorization.
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