He belonged to a dynasty of sausage-slingers, stuffing ground pork into hog casings like his father and his grandfather before him. That was life as an Ostrowski in Baltimore. As a child, Victor, nicknamed Junior by the family, thought it would be that way forever.

At least, that’s what his grandparents used to tell him. The Polish family’s eponymous brand of kielbasas and Italian sausage had lit up the local meat market since 1919. One news writer described the food as “carnivorous magic.” Lines formed around the South Washington Street shop during the holidays, when Victor Ostrowski Jr. would help inside his family’s cluttered kitchen. He carefully measured onions, garlic and celery seed seasonings, feeding a generation of blue-collar East Baltimoreans.

At 71, Victor Jr. is the last Ostrowski sausage-maker standing. Ostrowski’s of Bank Street — opened by him and his father after a family feud in 1976 saw them break off from his grandparents’ South Washington Street location — is the only building still bearing the family name.

With more than a century of pork-filled recipes behind him, Ostrowski said, he’s been left to tread water in an industry rapidly changing from the one in which he grew up.

“You have to adapt, or you close the doors,” he said while at the shop recently.

These days, Ostrowski still wakes up at 5 a.m. to weigh out the spices like his family taught him. He prepares the pork, a boneless picnic shoulder that used to be one of five cuts brought in by processor and distributor Smithfield Foods. Now it’s the only readily available cut the company sells.

The casings, no longer made from hog intestines but a more efficient, artificial collagen, are often put on with a pricey, 15-year-old wrapping machine. When it breaks, his daughter and kielbasa heir apparent, Melissa Gunther, will sit on the kitchen steps exhausted, he said.

As the usual six-person kitchen staff arrives, the meat is ground into a bucket and mixed and blended with seasonings. Extra garlic helps differentiate his spicy kielbasa and Italian sausage from the mild. A smokehouse just outside the kitchen holds dozens of smoked kielbasa rings at a time, while the fresh and loose sausage is packaged accordingly to be sold at the counter.

“Nothing sits around,” Ostrowski said.

The 10 days surrounding Thanksgiving are the busiest time of year for the shop, accounting for up to 35% of its annual revenue. Last year, it sold about 28,000 pounds of sausage in that period and another 4,000 around Christmas. Ostrowski said it’s a critical time to make up for the slow months after the holidays.

Critically acclaimed restaurants nearby use Ostrowski’s year round, though. You don’t see a lot of places like it, said Will Mester, whose place down the block, The Wren, was recently named to the New York Times’ and Bon Appetit’s best-restaurant lists. Mester works with the smaller, smoked kielbasa links for his Irish and German dishes and the larger ropes for red beans and rice.

“In a modern context, people don’t make sausage very well,” he said. New-age butchers are beholden to trends and supplements such as proteins or emulsifiers that keep frozen meat from getting dry or crumbly. But Ostrowski’s fresh kielbasa is made simply, Mester said. “It tastes exactly like it should, and that’s actually something that is difficult.”

Little Donna’s owner and chef Robbie Tutlewski, whose business is across the street, said he leaves a note on Ostrowski’s door after dinner service with a new sausage order for the morning. The garlicky, “make your breath stink” kielbasa is made fresh each day, he said. His Polish eatery, which also has made the Times’ best-restaurants list, uses the fresh and smoked versions for his sausage and sauerkraut, stuffs his schnitzel with the kielbasa and crumbles the Italian sausage on his pizza.

“He calls me every Friday to yell at me to pick up my order,” Tutlewski said.

Over the last five years, the Little Donna’s owner has wondered about the family recipe, even hearing neighbors question whether the sausage is different. “But you know what? They’re [Bank Street is] still open,” Tutlewski said. “The other sausage place isn’t; they are.”

Ostrowski’s not shy about that fact, either. He compares his grandparents to Hyman Roth, the fictional character who screwed Michael Corleone in “The Godfather Part II” — or in this case tapped Ostrowski’s uncle instead of his father to run the business. John, who inherited the kielbasa throne, sold the 524 S. Washington St. kitchen shortly before he died in 2014. The new owner, John Reusing of Bad Decisions Tavern, “didn’t know what he was doing,” Ostrowski said, and closed the store in 2016.

Despite spending decades working at the family shop, neither Ostrowski nor his father received a nickel for their share in the company, he said.

The pressure surrounding the family meats pushed Ostrowski and his father in and out of the business. His father didn’t want to work himself to death and considered leaving the industry multiple times, but Ostrowski remembered him saying family roped him back in.

“I tell my son now, when I croak, don’t come down here and take over the business. You need a consistent income,” Ostrowski said. “I’ll haunt you.”

Lawsuits over the family name, competing shops and strategies all drove a wedge through the Ostrowski legacy, but he has no regrets. For years, he spent every day with his father, his best friend and namesake, before burying him in 1995.

“My father wanted this. He pulled up stakes to do this,” Ostrowski said of the store, which recognized wholesale sausage as the way forward.

When grocers’ profit margins slipped and some local stores closed, Ostrowski’s kielbasa still sold, making up 95% of the shop’s revenue. The sausages are in more than 50 Maryland stores, including branches of Safeway and Weis, despite a drying up of the walk-in retail space since COVID-19. Longtime Ostrowski’s loyalists are in their 80s and 90s, Ostrowski said, and others have moved away. He gets calls from them asking for shipments, but Ostrowski refuses to ruin the integrity of the sausage.

Many of the orders come in text messages to Ostrowski’s flip phone — a dinosaur his staff members have mocked him for. Each inquiry gets one of three responses — “Yes.” “No. “OK.” — often sent from his second-floor office, referred to as his cave.

“Melissa says, ‘Dad, you gotta stop living in a cave,’” he said, sitting in front of a collage of his grandchildren splayed across his desk, the only decoration in the room.

But he has no plans to retire and no real retirement fund. He’s just trying to sell enough sausage to keep the lights on, a target that often shifts in an old, compact building in constant need of repair and an increasingly consolidated industry.

He couldn’t help but think about the shop’s survival at Gunther’s wedding a few weeks ago. He walked his daughter down the aisle and then pulled his son-in-law to the side. After offering his congratulations, Ostrowski got to the meat of it.

“So you got married and because of all that you think you’re getting an in on the family sausage recipe?” Ostrowski asked. “You think you’re ready for that?”