It’s been four years since any bacon or ham came out of the Peer Foods plant in Back of the Yards, but a vaguely meaty aroma still lingers in its echoing, mostly empty four floors. Due southwest of the erstwhile Packingtown gate, it was one of the last meat-processing plants from the heyday of the stockyards to close down. When the operation moved to Indiana in 2006, about 400 jobs went with it.
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Edel was the subject of a 2005 Reader cover story about the trials and tribulations of rescuing a decrepit 24,000-square-foot Bridgeport paint warehouse overrun by wild dogs and violent, racist bikers. An industrial designer and original member of the Rat Patrol, a crew that builds bicycles out of scavenged parts, he was intent on restoring the building using materials plucked from the waste stream. Today Bubbly Dynamics, aka the Chicago Sustainable Manufacturing Center, is fully occupied—by bicycle makers, artists, screen printers, metal fabricators, and a tutoring program for at-risk kids—and turns a profit for Edel, the landlord.
Some proponents suggest that slick, futuristic designs with prohibitive construction and energy-use costs are what have so far rendered the proliferation of such enterprises impractical. “You’d have to sell a lot of arugula to pay for a glass skyscraper,” says Edel. “I think we need to walk before we can run.”
Despite Edel’s one-foot-in-front-of-the-other talk, this is a pretty ambitious project. Edel and his cohort want to operate part of the Plant as a not-for-profit 35,000-square-foot research farm, and will start installing some 20,000 square feet of growing beds on the plant’s second floor in about two months. A different for-profit tenant, 312 Aquaponics, moves in at the end of the year and will set up a three-tiered aquaponics system. Fish that grow to market size will be processed in the basement, adjacent to a mushroom farm fertilized by waste products from the farm and brewery. With those, greenhouses on the roof, and more growing areas in the back lot, Edel wants to supply produce to other food businesses that move into the building as well as to external restaurants and wholesalers.
