- The last meatpackers in NYC’s Meatpacking District are getting ready to close shop.
- Last month, NYC’s mayor announced plans to develop the site near Greenwich Village and the High Line.
- Once a meat industry hub, the district now hosts luxury brands and nightlife venues.
The era of New York City’s Meatpacking District as a neighborhood where people actually pack meat is coming to an end.
Late last month, New York City Mayor Eric Adams unveiled plans to redevelop the district’s last operating meat market after its tenants accepted a deal from the city to move out — and in the market’s place could come a 60-story tower.
Once brimming with hundreds of butchers, slaughterhouses, and packing plants, the Manhattan neighborhood now has only a handful of meatpackers left, and they’re preparing to close up shop, the Associated Press reported this week in a retrospective looking back at the district.
Under the city’s plan, the 66,000-square-foot Gansevoort Market would become Gansevoort Square, which, according to the mayor’s office, would feature 600 mixed-income housing units, a new open pavilion, and a culture and arts hub.
And a New York state senator said there’s a plan to build a 60-story skyscraper in the area — something a local historic preservation group said was out of scale for a neighborhood with mostly low-rise buildings.
The city hasn’t confirmed the plans referenced by State Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal in a recent email newsletter he sent to constituents. The community group Village Preservation said Monday that a tower plan would likely be formally announced at an upcoming neighborhood Community Board meeting.
A building that tall would dramatically alter the neighborhood’s skyline, where the current tallest structure, The Standard Hotel, is 19 stories tall. The mayor’s office didn’t immediately return a request for comment on the possible skyscraper development.
Meanwhile, though an eviction date has not yet been set for the building’s meatpacking tenants, they’re getting ready to say goodbye.
One of them is 68-year-old John Jobbagy, whose connection to the district goes back more than 120 years. His grandfather started butchering there after immigrating from Budapest in 1900, the AP reported.
Back then, the Meatpacking District looked — and smelled — a lot different from today, where high-end retailers like Gucci and Rolex now line the streets alongside cocktail bars, clubs, and luxury apartment buildings. In 2025, high-end French crystal company Baccarat is moving into the neighborhood, Women’s Wear Daily first reported this month.
“I’ll be here when this building closes, when everybody, you know, moves on to something else,” Jobbagy told the AP. “And I’m glad I was part of it, and I didn’t leave before.”
Jobbagy told the AP that he started working for his father in the area in the late 1960s, at a time when chicken juices dribbled into the streets, and workers relied on whiskey to keep themselves warm in the refrigerated lockers.
Jobbagy later opened his own business there, which he’s held onto as the neighborhood changed over the years, the AP reported.
The neighborhood became a gritty nightlife and sex club scene in the 1970s and, by the early 2000s, a hip, up-and-coming area where “Sex and the City’s” Samantha Jones chose to live amid sex workers, leather bars, and an incoming Pottery Barn.
In 2009, the railway that once transported millions of tons of meat, dairy, and produce through the district was turned into a public park, the High Line.
But Jobbagy told local outlet amNY he isn’t too broken up about leaving the neighborhood that would now be unrecognizable to his father or grandfather.
“It’s been a long time coming,” Jobbagy told amNY. “The transformations have been taking place for the last 20 years. We’re well aware there are far better uses for this property than an aging meat warehouse. I’m not really sad at all.”
Change has always been part of the district’s DNA, and New York City’s.
“It wasn’t always a meatpacking district,” Andrew Berman, the executive director at historic preservation group Village Preservation, told the AP. “It was a sort of wholesale produce district before that, and it was a shipping district before that.” In the early 1800s, it became home to a military fort, built there over fears that the British would invade during the War of 1812.
“So it’s had many lives, and it’s going to continue to have new lives,” Berman told the AP.
