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…
Read More: Live poultry’s role in Chicago history