The Hill, St. Louis

Why St. Louis — The Clay Mines and the Lombard Workers

The Hill's Italian community has an origin story unlike most American Italian neighbourhoods, which were built by the port cities — New York, Boston, Baltimore, New Orleans. St. Louis is deep inland, 900 miles from the Atlantic, and the Italians who came to The Hill came not through Ellis Island and onto Lower Manhattan but through the specific labour demand of Missouri's clay and coal mining industry.

The fireclay of south St. Louis County was some of the finest in North America, and the brickyards that extracted and processed it needed workers who were not afraid of difficult, physical underground labour. Italian labour recruiters — working through the padrone networks that organised Italian immigrant labour throughout the Midwest — began recruiting in Lombardy and Piedmont in the 1880s. The men who came were not southern Italians, as in most East Coast Italian communities: they were northern Italians from the Alpine foothills, men whose fathers had worked in the Milan brickworks or the Bergamo quarries.

They settled on the elevated ground of southwest St. Louis because it was close to the clay pits and affordable. They called it La Montagna — the mountain — a slight exaggeration for a district that rises perhaps fifty feet above the surrounding streets, but a name that carried a memory of the Alpine terrain they had left. Over time, La Montagna became The Hill, which was what English speakers called it, and it became the Italian name too.

The Neighbourhood That Stayed Italian

Most American Italian neighbourhoods followed a pattern: dense immigrant settlement, a generation or two of working-class community, then suburbanisation as the children achieved economic mobility and moved to the outer ring. The Hill resisted this pattern more successfully than almost any other Italian-American neighbourhood in the country.

Several factors contributed. The neighbourhood had its own institutions — Holy Ambassadors Church (founded 1903), St. Ambrose Parish (1903), the Italian-language newspapers, the social clubs, the bocce courts — that were deeply embedded in the physical fabric of the neighbourhood rather than in easily transportable organisations. The bocce courts on Marconi Avenue have been in continuous use since 1920. St. Ambrose's bell tower can be seen from most of the neighbourhood. These are not things you can relocate to the suburbs.

The neighbourhood also had the active support of Italian-American community organisations that consciously worked to maintain its character. When the urban renewal programmes of the 1960s threatened to demolish portions of The Hill, the community organised effective resistance. The streets that were preserved are still lined with the two-family brick houses — the traditional St. Louis housing form, brought to The Hill by Italian builders who adapted the local construction material to the housing type they knew — that have defined the neighbourhood since the 1910s.

The result is a neighbourhood that is genuinely Italian in the present tense, not just the heritage past: the grocery stores sell pasta from producers in Emilia-Romagna, the restaurants offer toasted ravioli alongside dishes from the regional Italian canon, the social clubs play bocce through the St. Louis spring and autumn, and the church bulletin at St. Ambrose still includes notes in Italian alongside the English.

Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola: The Hall of Fame Block

Lawrence Peter Berra — Yogi — was born on May 12, 1925, at 5447 Elizabeth Avenue, The Hill, St. Louis, Missouri. His parents, Pietro and Paolina Berra, had emigrated from Malvaglio, a small town in the province of Milan in Lombardy. His father worked in the brick kilns. His mother cooked Italian food. He grew up speaking Italian at home and English in the street, playing baseball in the vacant lots between the brick houses.

One house away, at 5446 Elizabeth Avenue, Joseph Henry Garagiola was born on February 12, 1926. His parents, John and Angelina Garagiola, were also from the Lombard tradition of The Hill. The two boys played together in the streets, played baseball together in the lot at Elizabeth and Magnolia, and went to school together at St. Ambrose. Both were signed by professional teams before they were eighteen. Both reached the major leagues. Both became Hall of Famers in different capacities — Berra as one of the greatest catchers in the history of baseball, Garagiola as a broadcaster whose career in the press box outlasted his career on the field.

The block of Elizabeth Avenue between Magnolia and Cooper is now officially designated as "Hall of Fame Place," in recognition of the two men who grew up there within twelve months and one front door of each other. A red fire hydrant marks Berra's spot, a blue one marks Garagiola's — St. Louis Cardinals colours, naturally. The Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center is not in St. Louis but in Montclair, New Jersey, where Berra spent his adult life; but The Hill maintains its own commemoration, and the story of the two boys on Elizabeth Avenue is central to the neighbourhood's identity.

Berra's Yogiisms — "It ain't over till it's over," "When you come to a fork in the road, take it," "It's like déjà vu all over again" — have become so embedded in American culture that many people who say them don't know their origin. They came from a man who was formed on a specific block in a specific Italian-American neighbourhood in St. Louis, who learned to think in two languages before he was ten and whose apparent linguistic paradoxes owed something to that bilingual formation.

Toasted Ravioli: The Accidental Invention

Toasted ravioli — pasta stuffed with meat, breaded, deep-fried, and served with marinara sauce for dipping — is one of the most distinctive dishes in American regional cuisine, and it was invented on The Hill, by accident, sometime in the 1940s. The exact story is disputed between two restaurants, Mama Campisi's (originally known as Charlie Gitto's) and Ruggeri's, each of which claims the founding accident: a piece of ravioli dropped into the deep fryer instead of the boiling water, retrieved, tasted, and found to be better than expected.

The accident story may or may not be literally true — origin myths for food inventions are notoriously unreliable — but the result is genuine. Toasted ravioli, called T-rav by St. Louisans, is now served across the city and has spread to Italian restaurants throughout the Midwest. It remains most closely associated with The Hill, where it was first prepared and where the restaurants that claim its invention continue to serve it.

The dish is a perfect emblem of what Italian-American cooking does: it takes an Italian technique (pasta, stuffed pasta specifically) and adapts it to local materials and local habits (deep frying, the meat-heavy fillings of the American Midwest), producing something that is neither Italian nor simply American but specifically Italian-American — a new thing made from old ingredients, which is what the whole community was.

The Bocce Courts and the Social Life of The Hill

The bocce courts on Marconi Avenue are the social centre of The Hill. They have been in use since 1920, when the first courts were laid by Italian immigrants who wanted to play the game they had played in Lombardy and could not imagine playing anywhere else. The courts are free, maintained by the Hill 2000 community organisation, and open to anyone who wants to play.

On summer evenings the courts are occupied by a mix of elderly Italian men playing the game with the seriousness they have brought to it for fifty years, and younger residents and visitors who have learned the game more recently. The specific ritual of bocce — the placement of the pallino, the argument about which ball is closer, the measurement with the tape measure that someone always has in their pocket — is identical on The Hill to the ritual in a park in Bergamo, which is the point. Some things travelled all the way from Lombardy to Missouri and arrived intact.

St. Ambrose Parish remains the anchor institution of The Hill. The annual Hill Days festival each summer draws former residents who have moved to the suburbs back to the neighbourhood — a reverse migration, if only for a weekend, of the kind that happens when a neighbourhood retains enough of its character to remain a destination rather than just a memory.

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