Cleavers once rang on these Fulton Market blocks; today the district that fed the nation codes for it. For more than a century Fulton Market was Chicago's wholesale food center, a raucous landscape of meatpackers, produce wholesalers, and loading docks, the working edge of the city that poet Carl Sandburg called Hog Butcher for the World. Trucks idled, cleavers rang, and the cobblestones ran with the business of feeding America.
In the 2010s the neighborhood transformed almost overnight: Google took over a former cold-storage warehouse, McDonald's built its headquarters here, and the old packing houses became some of the most celebrated restaurants in the country, anchored by chef Grant Achatz's Alinea nearby. Read the bones of the buildings here; you can still see the freight canopies, the painted signs of vanished meat firms, and the heavy industrial brick now wrapped around glass and steel.