Vintage Chicago Tribune: Live poultry stores beckon immigrants with smells, tastes of home

It was the week before Christmas and creatures were stirring in John’s Live Poultry, a storefront butcher shop at 5955 W. Fullerton Ave.

Chickens were loudly clucking, some alternately pecking at a feeding tray attached to their cage. In the tier below, quail were napping. An employee handing customers’ orders out a pass-through window was singing: “La Blanca Navidad llega. Y nos alegra el corazón.”

A drum beat — Whack! Whack! — punctuated the Spanish version of “White Christmas.” Workers were slaughtering fowl and removing their feathers in the back room.

The front door was open and a musty smell perfumed the sidewalk. It prompted some passersby to keep on going. But it also attracted a steady stream of customers.

Live-poultry stores draw immigrants for whom a barnyard odor means farm-fresh meat. Their Americanized offspring buy supermarket chickens, each encased in a plastic sarcophagus. This makes room for more recent arrivals to the country at stores like John’s. Ethnic succession is the hallmark of the live-chicken story.

“It is the American dream,” said Ray Ziyad, who has owned the store for 28 years. Born in Jordan, he was a child when he came to Chicago, scarcely imagining he would one day own his own business. Al Gordon, from whom he bought the store, which dates to 1942, recounted its history to an Associated Press reporter in 1988.

“When this one opened, I’d say there were 14 or 15 other live-poultry stores like it within a 5-mile radius,” Gordon said. The Northwest Side community gave him a customer base of Italians, Greeks and Poles.

Ziyad reports that his clientele is largely Spanish-speaking and that his is the neighborhood’s only live-poultry store. Citywide, there may be fewer than a dozen, according to an online search.

Live-chicken stores have for decades provoked strong reactions, pro and con.

In 1949, the City Council debated an ordinance that would have put 250 live-poultry stores out of business for being too close to residences, schools, churches and other institutions. “Mayor (Martin) Kennelly said he visited a number of the establishments affected, and found conditions in 60 percent of them deplorable,” the Tribune reported.

In 2020, Meghan Boyles, a 22-year-old DePaul graduate, complained to a WGN reporter about the sights and sounds emanating from Ciales Poultry Store at 2141 W. Armitage Ave. in Bucktown.

“I can hear the birds screaming and crying, it’s miserable,” Boyles said. “Even though the store’s owner is her landlord, she insists she had no idea before she moved in that poultry was being killed steps from her apartment.”

It’s unclear how that class conflict was resolved.

But in 1980, Ruth Gumer took the other side of the argument. Not wanting to buy supermarket chickens “raised in cramped quarters,” she wrote to the Tribune’s “Action Line” asking for the names of live-poultry stores. Ciales was among those the editor recommended, and it remains in business today.

Paleontologists report that the chickens were among the early domesticated animals that humans ate. It has had 6,000 to 12,000 years to tug on humanity’s heart strings, which is attested to by the variety of customs involving the bird.

Chinese folklore credits chickens with the ability to differentiate between truth and falsehood. In 1908, an attorney in a Chicago murder trial made a request for witnesses to be sworn in before a rooster, the Tribune reported.

The prosecution’s witnesses being Chinese, the defense wanted each to kill a rooster in the courtroom and write in its blood “a pledge that he will tell the truth or suffer the fate he has just inflicted on another living creature.”

In 1930, the Tribune reported that a man named Peter Theros bought a chicken from a Romani couple (described at the time as Gypsies) and, as instructed, hung it over a candle, which the couple purported to be a prescription for making Theros rich. Two days later, he told the sellers the chicken was still alive and that he was still working in steel mill.

“Better bring us $800 more,” the couple replied. Ultimately, he had brought them his entire savings.

The couple at some point disappeared, he told police. “They’re still out,” the Tribune noted. “So is Theros.”

By Jewish tradition, a rooster is annually freighted with a man’s sins. A hen bears a woman’s. On the eve of Yom Kippur, the pious swing the birds over their heads, three times, while saying: “This is my exchange, this is my substitute, this is my atonement. This rooster (hen) will go to its death, while I will enter and proceed to a good long life and to peace.”

When Devon Avenue was the rialto of the Orthodox Jewish community, a flatbed truck loaded with poultry cages would appear just before the Day of Atonement. Customers would not so much buy as rent a bird. After performing the kapparot ritual, they’d hand it back to the vendor to be slaughtered and given to a poor person.

When Chicago was, as Carl Sandburg wrote, “hog butcher to the world,” it had a community of schochetim, who slaughtered animals according to ritual and serviced the kosher trade. But that community moved on to Postville, Iowa, noted Rabbi Leonard Matanky of Congregation KNS, who has served on the Chicago Rabbinical Council’s kosher-regulations committee. That move leaves Chicago without ritual slaughterers.

So who could properly dispatch the kapparot birds? Judaism’s prescription for slaughtering animals is minutely detailed, as was noted in a lawsuit brought by then-Illinois Attorney General Neil Hartigan against Shelat Kosher Foods, in 1987.

Its owner also had a nonkosher chicken operation. That output sold chickens for less than Shelat’s, because of the greater cost involved in kosher processing. For instance, kosher chickens have to be brined to draw out the blood that Orthodox Jews are forbidden to consume, even a drop, leaving the birds saltier than those that don’t go through the kosher process.

Shelat’s management cut costs by putting a kosher label on its nonkosher chickens. It admitted to the sleight–of-hand trick and went out of business when confronted with irrefutable evidence, as The Associated Press reported:

“The allegations in the lawsuit are based on laboratory analyses of the poultry that found salt levels similar to non-kosher food.”

Matanky recalled that his mother would take him with her to Odes Poultry Market at 4741 N. Kedzie Ave. The owner, a schochet, gave him a peek of the back room where the slaughtering was done.

But it and all the former Jewish live-chicken stores are gone. Without a ritual slaughterer, a schochet, they were unable to offer kosher poultry.

At John’s Live Poultry, it was clear what Ziyad meant when he described his American dream, one that enabled a penniless immigrant to become an entrepreneur. He ran a store that welcomed recent arrivals with the taste and smell of their homeland.

And as the birds and the feathers flew, it recalled a gentile attorney general who put out the word that if you call your chickens kosher, they better taste salty.

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