Live Poultry Shop, a Tradition for Many Decades, May Be a Dying Breed

The shop sounds like a barnyard. Roosters crow, chickens cluck and squawk, pigeons coo and rabbits thump and jostle in their cages.

Step inside, back to a time when there were no giant supermarket chains or frozen-food sections, and mom-and-pop grocery stores kept crates of live chickens out back.

At the small store, tucked away in a Polish and Italian neighborhood, customers who order a fryer, broiler or roaster take home chicken so fresh it was squawking 15 minutes earlier.

The butcher, who wields his knife with a surgeon’s pride, also sells fresh rabbit, quail, pigeon, duck, geese and the bantam roosters favored in some Italian kitchens for stews and sauces.

Dates to World War II

“I’ve been here for 27 years and the store’s been here since the Second World War,” said the proprietor, Al Gordon, 51, although the sign out front reads, “John’s Live Poultry and Egg Market.”

“Everyone calls me John,” Gordon said. “The store was originally John’s and I left everything the way it was, and so I got a nickname along with it.”

Once as common a sight in Chicago as elevated trains, live poultry shops are disappearing here and around the country.

“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.

“When I was a kid growing up, there used to be one of these every mile. And all of the mom-and-pop grocery stores used to have crates of chickens in the back and butchered chickens to sell.”

Nowadays, stores like John’s are found mostly in the major cities, New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, said Bill Roenigk, an economist with the National Broiler Council, a Washington-based lobbying group for the poultry industry. “I would say they’re hanging on in certain ethnic communities,” he said.

Zoning, Codes Cited

Restrictive zoning and health codes--John’s market is exempt from the strictest new rules under a grandfather clause--have made it too costly to open a live poultry store, Gordon said.

But he contends that fresh poultry raised on natural grains tastes different, and much better, than commercially produced birds.

With Americans becoming more concerned about a healthy diet, U.S. poultry consumption has jumped from the 1970 average of 48 pounds per person to 87 pounds last year, Roenigk said.

“But while people want it fresh, they also want it convenient,” he said. “Going and buying a live chicken is not convenient.”

Once in the neighborhood, it isn’t all that inconvenient to make a 15-minute stop at John’s.

That’s all it took when Hector and Juanita Rodriguez, Puerto Rico natives and Chicagoans for 35 years, stopped in recently for a fryer and a capon, a male chicken neutered to produce a fatter bird.

“Fresh poultry tastes better,” said Juanita Rodriguez, 62. “The Spanish-speaking people like to make rice chicken and prefer live chicken.”

Weighing In

Dorothy (Bubbles) Luckczwski, who runs the counter and cash register, reached into a cage and grabbed a chicken by the wings, flopping the squawking bird atop a meat scale.

“That’ll be $5.99,” she said, taking the $1-a-pound fryer back to the butchering room.

The procedure is swift. The chicken is plucked by a machine and within 15 minutes the Rodriguez family is on its way home.

Customers browsing at John’s find a wall of cages stacked three high and running the length of the shop.

Clucking white chickens fill the first few stacks. Then there’s a cage holding a dozen tiny brown-and-white quail, scurrying beneath a carved wooden sign: “2 for $5.”

Next come snowy pigeons and rabbits--black, white or rust-colored Flemish giants--and the raucous ranks of bantam roosters, a half-dozen clamoring black-and-gray birds who apparently always think it’s sunup.

Gordon has run the store since 1961, when fate put him behind the counter on the city’s Northwest Side, amid neighborhoods of Italians, Poles, Greeks and other ethnic groups.

His father, who had run a liquor store and a tavern, bought the butcher shop when the original John put it up for sale.

Inherited Store, Nickname

Gordon, then 25, was launching his career as a sales representative for the American Tobacco Co. But two months later, in November, 1961, the elder Gordon died and his son inherited the store--and the nickname.