A place to rustle up some vegan grub

Order a pizza or a sub at T.J. Scallywaggle's in Allston, and you'll get soy-based cheese, or mock meat made with soy protein, but no animal products.

Go back a couple of centuries, however, and animal products were all you could have found on that site.

A cattle and sheep slaughterhouse stood on the property, in the heart of what was the livestock center of New England.

That's a far cry from the current incarnation of the shop on Cambridge Street, where T.J. Scallywaggle's offers vegan fare, meaning it serves no meat, dairy, or eggs, explains owner Steve Karian.

"This looks like a small business, but deep down, it's really a social project," said Karian, who bought the shop about a year ago and said he wasn't aware of the neighborhood's history. "We're trying to make it easy for people to choose wholesome, cruelty-free eating, while building a progressive community and establishing a new form of enterprise."

According to William Marchione, president of the Brighton-Allston Historical Society, "The cattle market was established in 1775 to supply Washington's Continental Army with food. Cattle and livestock were driven over roads all over New England in this direction for decades."

The cattle trade was busiest during the mid-19th century, when it occupied most of the current Brighton-Allston area. Forty-odd slaughterhouses lining North Beacon, Cambridge, and Washington streets handled hundreds of thousands of cows, sheep, and pigs to the tune of $2 million to $3 million in business annually.

Lucrative, yes. Hygienic, hardly.

A report published by the Massachusetts Board of Health in 1870 described how these 19th-century slaughterhouses produced large quantities of animal waste. A "putrid mass, consisting of blood, the excrement of the animals killed, the half-digested food contained in the entrails, and the offal itself is scraped and banked up on the ground (often very spongy) or carted off to be spread upon land. The track of these carts is evident both to sight and smell."

In 1872, in response to public health problems, all 42 slaughterhouses were consolidated into the Brighton Abattoir. The 42-acre complex sprawled out from the Charles River on a parcel between the North Beacon Street and Arsenal Street bridges. It, too, closed in 1957 to make way for an industrial park and the Leo M. Birmingham Parkway.

Marchione said the assortment of stockyards, slaughterhouses, and factories left an imprint on the area and on the nation.

The Stockyard Restaurant, an Allston neighborhood landmark, stands next to the former site of the Brighton Abattoir.

Zachariah B. Porter, the first manager of Brighton's largest hotel, the Cattle Fair, later founded the Porter House Hotel in Cambridge, from which Porter Square and the porterhouse steak derive their names.

Local butcher and slaughterhouse owner Gus Swift eventually moved to Chicago, where he established the Swift meatpacking company.

Since the heyday of the cattle trade in New England, the neighborhood that was once its center has changed.

Kelly McDonald, 19, lives in Allston with five other vegans. She says that with the presence of T.J. Scallywaggle's and the Grasshopper, a restaurant next door serving Asian vegetarian food, the neighborhood is becoming increasingly vegan-friendly.

"Because these two restaurants are here, people kind of congregate around them, especially with the student population here also," McDonald said.

Mike Arthur, 18, and Julie Marcus, 17, also appreciate the presence of the two restaurants. Arthur, a dark-haired folk-punk musician who stopped eating meat 2 1/2 years ago, says that his "fully Italian, meatball-loving" family still urges him to eat meat." 'Just have a little,' they say. 'It's not going to hurt you.' "

Marcus chimes in from her faux-fur-lined hood: "That's what my grandfather always says: 'It's already dead. Just eat it.' "

Still, Arthur and Marcus prefer the vegan options nearby. "When I became vegan, before I knew about these restaurants, I would just eat candy and French fries," Arthur confesses. "This is way healthier."

Karian has big plans for his restaurant. He has taken out the deep fryers left over from the previous eatery, a meat-based pizza and sub shop, and hopes to find enough investors to open a shop in Jamaica Plain in the coming year.

In the long term, Karian's dream is to expand across the country and compete with franchise fast-food giants such as McDonald's and Burger King.

"If somebody like us goes up and down the East Coast and West Coast, we get that solid base in more urban, progressive centers," he said. "Then we can go into the red states, into cattle country."