“This is not the kind of job you talk about in social situations, because most people find it distasteful,” says Don Smith, frowning. “What we do isn’t for everybody. But it’s a job that has to be done. We can’t have deceased animals lying all over our streets.”
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Until 1978, a private rendering company picked up the city’s dead animals. Then the city put in the pathological incinerator, which is inconspicuously located behind the Department of Streets and Sanitation’s 42nd Ward office on North Branch Street just off West Division. Its brown-painted aluminum walls rise along the Chicago River across from a storage area filled with luxury sailboats. With its three chimneys, the incinerator looks like a small power plant.
The tons of flesh, fur, and bone are reduced to buckets of ashes, which are hauled away by scavengers, probably to be landfilled. “Basically this place prevents disease and saves room in our landfills,” Smith says.
“We don’t broadcast our existence here,” he says, smiling. “Some people might not want to know that this occurs anywhere.”
Smith has seen many a weak-stomached city worker come and go in nearly ten years of overseeing the incinerators. “When I first got assigned here I said ‘Why me? I’m an animal lover.’ I had to adjust. This isn’t a job for someone who has never seen a dead thing. But the bottom line is it’s a sanitary way to dispose of this city’s tons of carcasses.”
