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Chicago's “back-of-the-yards” district is a smoky, sprawling area where nearly 100,000 packing-house workers live in old, dreary tenements whose rotting walls soak in the acrid stench of the stockyards. The people who live and work here are Slavic, Irish, Negro and Mexican, and national or racial affiliations count greatest as factors of identification. The pattern of their living could easily serve as a model for the standard denunciations of beltline capitalism: the hard, terrible monotony of work; the frustrations built by the disparity of squalid living and the fantasy world of Hollywood; the long rows of cheap bars and gin-mills; the sense of violence hanging heavily over the neighborhood.

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