The Hill, St. Louis

The Hill is a mostly Italian-American neighborhood within St. Louis, Missouri, located on high ground south of Forest Park. The official boundaries of the area are Manchester Avenue(Missouri Route 100) on the north, Columbia and Southwest Avenues on the south, South Kingshighway Boulevard on the east, and Hampton Avenue on the west.

Its name is due to its proximity to the highest point of the city, formerly named Saint Louis Hill, which is a few blocks south, at the intersection of Arsenal Street and Sublette Avenue, around 38°34′22.12″N, 90°16′53.1″W (38.6061440, -90.2814178). The intersection borders Sublette Park, the former site of the Social Evil Hospital built there in 1873.

Italians from northern Italy immigrated and settled in the area starting in the late 19th century, attracted by jobs in nearby plants established to exploit deposits of clay discovered by immigrants in the 1830s.

With the growth of Italian immigration came the growth in the influence of the Roman Catholic Church such that the Parish of Our Lady, Help of Christians, was founded in the downtown area of Saint Louis in 1900 to serve primarily recent Sicilian immigrants, while the Parish of Saint Ambrose was founded in what later came to be known as the Hill in 1903 to serve primarily the recent northern Italian immigrants. By the time the new church of Saint Ambrose was built in 1926, the Parish had already been a force in the area for over twenty years. The structure [1] is modeled after San Ambrogio Church in Milan, in an Lombard-Romanesque style of brick and terra cotta. It became the parish church for the area in 1955, after thirty years of focusing on those of Italian heritage. When Our Lady, Help of Christians, Parish closed in 1975, Saint Ambrose became the center of Catholic life among many Italian/Sicilian-Americans in the Saint Louis area.

That heritage remains evident today. As of May 2003, about three-quarters of the residents are Italian-Americans, helped perhaps by the practice of rarely listing homes on the open market [2]. The neighborhood is home to a large number of locally renowned Italian-American restaurants, bakeries, grocery stores, and two bocce gardens. Some businesses on the Hill are Amighetti's Bakery, J. Viviano and Sons grocery, and Pizzeria della Piazza(review), as well as Di Gregorio's grocery, Rigazzi's restaurant, and Missouri Baking Company.

Baseball greats Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola grew up on the Hill; their boyhood homes are across the street from each other on Elizabeth Avenue. Four of the five St. Louisans on the US soccer team that defeated England in the 1950 FIFA World Cup came from here, a story that is told in The Game of Their Lives, a book (ISBN 0-8050-3875-2) and 2005 docudrama. The movie's title was "The Game of Their Lives" in theaters and has been renamed "The Miracle Match" for the now-available DVD.

According to Joe Garagiola's book, Baseball is a Funny Game, the Hill was called "Dago Hill" by some non-Italians (pronounced eye-talians). Casually used in public into the late 1960s/early 1970s, the phrase is now considered offensive, and is rarely used today.

Trivia

"It's so crowded nobody goes there anymore." Was said by Yogi Berra about Ruggiero's where he and Joe Garagiola had worked as waiters, which had become so popular that his old friends couldn't get in anymore. (An example of his famous Yogiisms.)

External links and reference

• Official Neighborhood Website hosted by St. Louis City
• Italy at St. Louis (multilingual)
• Great resource for Hill restaurants, businesses & stores
• City of St. Louis information on the area from the 1970s
• St. Ambrose Parish

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