South Chicago and the Southeast Side were steel. For a century the neighborhoods around the Calumet River — South Chicago, South Deering, the East Side — were defined by the mills: U.S. Steel South Works on the lakefront, Wisconsin Steel at South Deering, and the web of finishing, coke, and by-product operations that fed them. Generations of families worked the furnaces, the coke ovens, the rolling mills, and the powerhouses, and this is where asbestos exposure in Chicago was heaviest.
Steelmaking demanded materials that could stand up to molten metal and high-pressure steam, and through most of the twentieth century that reportedly meant asbestos — refractory linings in furnaces and ladles, block insulation on boilers, pipe covering on miles of steam lines, and asbestos-fiber gaskets throughout. The trades who built and maintained these plants — insulators, bricklayers and refractory workers, pipefitters, boilermakers, millwrights — were allegedly exposed in some of the most intense conditions of any industry. The mills are largely gone now; the exposure histories they created are not.