Along Wellington St., a few steps west of Niagara, there’s a gentle dip in the road where Garrison Creek is buried below. It’s here you can hear the death squeals of hogs as they’re unloaded from trucks into the Toronto abattoir, a sprawling building that’s tucked in between a row of Victorian Houses and the railway corridor.

This spot is ground zero for Toronto’s meat fetish, a city where charcuterie restaurants are in high fashion and its residents are bacon-obsessed. If you haven’t heard the squeals you may have seen the snouts of those pigs poking out of perforated 18-wheeler trailers on the Gardiner Expy. or Hwy. 427. This abattoir handles 25 per cent of Ontario’s pork and, depending on which way the wind is blowing, a pungent barnyard smell is present, though perhaps not for long.

Last week Quality Meat Packers, which has operated in this location since 1960, filed for bankruptcy protection , and this week production was halted , leaving the future of the 750 jobs here unknown. Apart lending some truth to Toronto’s old nickname “Hogtown,” Quality Meat Packers is one of the last large-scale industrial concerns in the old City of Toronto and a downtown bookend with another vestige of Toronto’s industrial might, the Redpath Sugar refinery at Queens Quay and Jarvis.

The houses along Niagara have an austerity to them that seems more 1960s Belfast or northern England than 2014 Toronto. In the alley, the wooden telephone poles, rusted chain link fence, and a utility cover that dates to 1910 evoke an old industrial landscape that was once common in Toronto.

The hog-hauling trucks will often park next door at the disused “ Wellington Destructor ,” a city-owned garbage incinerator built in 1925. Gorgeous but run down, it’s home to feral cats guarding the long cobblestone ramp to its entrance.

There’s been an abattoir on this site since the City opened a municipal slaughterhouse in 1915, eventually bought by Quality Meat Packers. But there were other abattoirs in the Fort York area for nearly two decades before this, and cattle yards before that . There are faint traces of the abattoir’s former grandness amid the ramshackle additions, though the villa-like belvedere towers on each corner, visible in archival photos, have been removed.

Quality Meat Packers is routinely in the news as new nearby residents who didn’t do their neighbourhood due diligence discover this century-old business in a city that still, on occasion, does some dirty work. Grumbles about a place this old are akin to new residents of Malton complaining about Pearson airport, though uneasiness with the smell goes back to at least 1909. On Jan. 15 that year an article in the Globe newspaper titled “The Old Fort and its Environment” claimed one of the greatest drawbacks to this neighbourhood was “the prevalence of offensive odours in the immediate vicinity,” suggesting Toronto has always been a sensitive city.

Even without the bankruptcy, it’s likely Quality Meat Packers would eventually take those hogs and jobs and move out of the city core , but it would be an incredible loss if these kinds of jobs left the city and meat eaters no longer had a direct and visceral connection to meat production. We rarely see how our iPhones or clothes are made unless there’s a disaster or controversy, but in Toronto, if the slaughterhouse remains, we can see, smell, and hear where the gravy train really comes from.

If we are the visionary city we think we are, one day the Destructor will be turned into a magnificent public building of some cultural importance and a pedestrian and cycling bridge will connect this area with the tens of thousands of people who live in the new neighbourhood around Fort York, knitting together old and new. But maybe the Toronto abattoir could remain as a living and dying museum of meat, a daily reminder of the pigs who gave all so Toronto could have bacon at brunch.

Shawn Micallef writes every Friday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef

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