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Back of the Yards and Canaryville share one official name, New City, community area 61: the blocks between Pershing and Garfield, Western and the rail yards, that housed the people who worked the Union Stock Yards for a century. The gate still stands on Exchange Avenue.
New City is bounded by Pershing Road on the north, Western Avenue and the CSX tracks on the west, the Norfolk Southern tracks on the east and Garfield Boulevard on the south. The name is the city’s, from the 1920s community-area maps; nobody uses it in conversation. Halsted Street divides the two neighborhoods people do name: Back of the Yards to the west, where the packinghouse workers lived, and Canaryville to the east, the Irish blocks between Halsted and the tracks.
The stockyards themselves took up the square mile north of 47th Street; since they closed in 1971 the land has become the Stockyards Industrial Park, which still employs thousands. About 44,000 people live in New City today, down from 87,000 in 1930.
Back of the Yards is the larger half, west of Halsted: Davis Square Park at its center, 47th Street as its main street, the churches built by each wave of arrivals (Irish, German, Czech, Polish, Lithuanian, then Mexican), and the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, founded in 1939, the model for community organizing across the country. Our Back of the Yards guide walks it.
Canaryville is the smaller, tighter neighborhood east of Halsted down to the tracks, with Fuller Park just beyond, a place that kept its Irish identity longer than almost anywhere in the city; our Canaryville guide covers it.
The Union Stock Yards opened on Christmas Day 1865 and for a century were the largest livestock market in the world; Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, published in 1906, was set in these blocks. Chicago annexed the Town of Lake, which included the yards, in 1889. The International Amphitheatre opened next to the yards in 1934 and hosted political conventions and the Beatles before it closed in 1999. The Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council was founded in 1939 and Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation in 1940, both here.
The yards closed in 1971 as meatpacking moved west, and the neighborhood spent decades recovering; Mexican families have been the largest group for decades now, and the industrial park, the parks and the schools carry the area now.
No train runs inside New City; the Red Line at 47th is a bus ride east, and the Orange Line at 35th/Archer and Western are to the north. The Halsted, Ashland and Western buses run north to the Loop and the Blue Line, and the 47th Street bus crosses to the Red Line. The Stevenson is a few minutes north for anyone driving.
Frame and brick workers’ cottages and two-flats from the 1880s to the 1920s, many raised over a basement apartment, with brick bungalows on the blocks toward Garfield Boulevard and a few larger courtyard buildings on the corners. Prices here are among the lowest on the Southwest Side for a solid masonry two-flat, which is why investors and first-time buyers both look.
Read our two-flat guide and the buying something older guide first; a century-old frame cottage and a brick two-flat need different inspections.
Yes. Back of the Yards and Canaryville are the two neighborhoods inside New City, Chicago’s official community area 61; Halsted Street divides them.
On the Southwest Side, between Pershing Road and Garfield Boulevard, from Western Avenue east to the rail yards, just south of the old Union Stock Yards.
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