Local residents say a nearby slaughterhouse stinks to high heaven — or at least to their condo balconies — and that the plant should go the way of its pigs.

Quality Meat Packers Ltd., and some sympathetic neighbours, argue that the company has been in the area for over 80 years and people should get used to its porcine odour.

As the abattoir’s summer stink rolls in, the pitched battle between Toronto’s industrial past and its glass tower present has split the quiet neighbourhood around King and Bathurst Sts.

“It’s no place for a slaughterhouse, downtown, with all those condos going up,” said Bob Ross, a 10-year resident and superintendent of Niagara Neighbourhood Co-op, an apartment block around the corner from the abattoir. “When this was an industrial area, OK, but it’s not any more.”

“It’s a shame they haven’t moved it yet. Everyone in the neighbourhood would like to see it go. There are protests all summer long, but nothing ever gets done.”

Ross says he didn’t know there was an abattoir down the road when he moved in — it was winter, when the plant’s fetid barnyard smell is muted, and his real estate agent neglected to mention the round, pink neighbours.

“People who move here in the winter, when the summer comes, they’re like, ‘What the hell?’

“The stink is ridiculous,” he added.

Scents are indeed stronger when it’s hot out, said Leslie Vosshall, a scientist of smell at The Rockefeller University in New York. That’s because at high temperatures, molecules are more prone to fly around in the atmosphere and enter our noses.

“You notice this when you’re cooking,” Vosshall said. “You buy some chicken soup and it’s frozen and you have to do a lot of huffing to get any scent … Then you dump it into the pan and you begin heating it up, and the heating of the chicken soup will release a cloud of chicken smell that fills your house.”

In the warren of streets surrounding the Wellington Ave. slaughterhouse, the cloud of smell is produced by the pig barn. And with about 6,000 live pigs arriving daily at the plant, that smell can be ripe.

“You have to ventilate the barn. You have to have air passing through the barn at all times,” explained Jim Gracie, vice-president for sales and marketing at Quality Meat Packers.

“That’s where the smell comes from. It’s how animals in barns smell — it’s a mix of everything.”

The piggy aroma wafts up the street to the Old York Bar & Grill, but owner Erin Dowse says the patio is packed all summer anyway.

She’s owned the Old York for 15 years, and while she was grossed out at first, she says she’s gotten used to the pig smell.

The people who wrinkle their noses are newcomers, she says, drawn to the area by its conversion from brick-and-mortar factory patch to yuppie playground.

“There’s been a huge influx of condo people who haven’t researched the area,” Dowse said. Plus, she added, shuttering the slaughterhouse would cost jobs — 700 people are employed by the plant.

Real estate agent Brad Lamb is the ultimate King-and-Bathurst condo person — he sells units in several buildings in the odour orbit, and lives across the street from the slaughterhouse.

Lamb hates the pigs. “I’m not sure what it is that I smell,” he said, “but it’s a very unpleasant smell.” He guessed it was probably feces.

“We shouldn’t be smelling that in what is really now a residential area,” he said.

He also objects to the sight of the pig transport trucks with ventilated siding rumbling along Wellington Ave. “You see their snouts sticking out,” Lamb lamented.

(The company says trucks are not allowed to arrive at the plant between 9:30 p.m. and 6 a.m., to avoid waking the neighbours.)

Lamb says that if he had time, he would spearhead an effort to have the slaughterhouse moved. “I hope someone will” take the lead, he said.

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But Joe D’Abramo of Toronto’s city planning department says there is no legal recourse for the abattoir’s opponents. “There’s no legal way to get rid of it” because the Planning Act of 1946 protects existing land owners from zoning decisions, he said.

“If you’ve earned the right to use your land in a certain way, cities can’t just change that and force you to move.

“Sometimes it’s not possible to wipe everything out and start anew.”