The Heart Is Meat: An 80s Memoir

In the early 80s, New York City’s Gansevoort Meatpacking District, a small irregular patch of the West Village, was a wild confluence of meat market workers, gay men hitting The Mineshaft or The Anvil, trans prostitutes, homeless huddled around burn barrels, New Jersey mafiosos, veterans of three wars, heroes of the French Resistance, and Holocaust survivors. Michael Backus was newly arrived to the city when he began working at Adolf Kusy Meats in 1982, a young man fresh out of college who ...