ENDANGERED SPECIES: MEAT HOOKS

You pronounce John T. Jobbagy's last name with the accent on the first syllable: “Joe-bagee.”

- -Ian Frazier

The two “b”s sound like one and the “g” is hard. It’s not the kind of name you run into every day. Like all surnames ending in “agy,” “Jobbagy” is Hungarian. The family has worked in Manhattan's meatpacking district for a hundred and twenty-five years. As his forebears did, Jobbagy arrives at work at four in the morning. He makes the two-mile trip from his apartment, in Stuyvesant Town, by car and does not drive much beyond that. His Lexus is twelve years old and has about eighteen thousand miles on it.

Jobbagy runs J.T. Jobbagy, Inc., whose packinghouse is near the corner of Little West Twelfth Street and Washington Street, by the far western end of Fourteenth. He is tall, long-armed and -legged, and totally at home in the neighborhood (fist bumps, quick conversations with passersby). He serves as the president of the Gansevoort Market Co-op. The other morning, Jobbagy, dressed in jeans and a light-brown ball cap, had breakfast with Jeffrey LeFrancois, the executive director of the Meatpacking District Management Association. The two met at Hector's, a longtime local diner, and talked, while a guy they'd asked to join them, who brought along a notebook, tried to keep up.