The City of St. Louis is one of the few independent cities in the country — it separated from St. Louis County in 1876 and has stood on its own ever since, with its own government and its own court. That quirk matters for an asbestos claim, because a case arising in the city is venued in the Twenty-Second Judicial Circuit, entirely separate from the surrounding county’s Twenty-First.
The city’s industrial spine ran along the riverfront and the near-north and near-south corridors: the breweries and their vast steam and refrigeration systems, the foundries and metal shops, the shoe and chemical plants, and the rail terminals that tied them together. From the early twentieth century into the 1980s, those operations reportedly relied on asbestos-containing pipe covering, block insulation, gaskets, and refractory — and the trades who built and maintained them may have been exposed throughout their careers.