St. Louis: Pride on "the Hill"

Many of the small and tightly knit ethnic communities that once dotted virtually every U.S. city have crumbled under the planner's rezoning and renewal schemes and the bulldozer's giant blade. One community that has successfully resisted the encroachment of urbanization is "the Hill," a 56-block, largely Italian area on the south side of St. Louis, where Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola grew up. After a series of fierce, emotion-charged struggles with local, state and federal officials, Hill residents now boast a model community that has the lowest crime rate and the highest property values in the city. TIME Correspondent Marguerite Michaels recently visited the Hill. Her report:

In the afternoons around 3:30, Joe ("Green") Verdi, Angelo ("Foots") Colombo, John ("Detroit") Agresti and other properly and not-so-properly nicknamed neighborhood men gather at Rose's Tavern for a glass of beer from the 7-ft. wooden cooler. Then they drift out back toward the grape arbor for a game of boccie. On Wednesdays, Amelia Garavaglia, 76, flours her plump, competent hands in the back room of Gioia's Corner Market and begins rolling out 5,000 ravioli for sale hi the front room. Each evening, Ida Galli switches on the spotlight hi her front yard-not to scare away burglars, but to illuminate a 3-ft.-high statue of the Blessed Virgin. It is all part of the pleasant, unhurried flavor of life today on the Hill.

Italian Sausage. There is a strong sense of ritual, both religious and community, on the Hill, where 90% of the population of 6,500 is Italian and 95% Catholic. There is also a bursting pride in the rows of narrow, well-scrubbed houses and in the family-run corner stores, where links of fat Italian sausage dangle in long rows. Many residents are direct descendants of the immigrants who left Lombardy at the turn of the century to work the clay mines of St. Louis under the hill that gives the section its name. Life on the Hill is as finely woven as Ann Reistino's brightly colored, crocheted afghans.

It was not always so. In the '60s, the neighborhood's youth began to drift away. Federal and state highway officials designated the path of Interstate Highway 44 through an area of the Hill. Assuming that land values would plunge with the construction of the road, many homeowners stopped maintaining their property. A local lead company began pumping slurry into the abandoned clay mines, threatening to undermine foundations. Explains Father Salvatore Polizzi, 43, associate pastor of St. Ambrose toman Catholic Church: "The Hill was becoming a blighted cemetery."

Polizzi determined to change things. e began delivering sermons urging the residents to regain their lost sense of spirit and pride. He also made a point of cultivating leaders of the area's strong Democratic organization.

His efforts paid off in his first encounter: discouraging the sale of land to builders of a planned drive-in theater. Polizzi sent the Democratic ward committeeman into the streets with a sound truck announcing an emergency meeting in the Big Club Hall. After a session exploring the blight that the drive-in would inflict on the area, a small army of Italian dowagers volunteered to lie down in front of the bulldozers. The sellers backed down, and the Hill's alderman quickly slipped a regulation through the zoning board forbidding a building permit for any drive-in within 500 ft. of a residential area.

Buoyed by that success, Polizzi once again rallied community support and forced the lead company to stop pumping waste into the abandoned mines. But the biggest fight was yet to come. By 1971 construction was well under way on Interstate 44. It cut off a segment of the community, isolating 150 families. Yet the state planned only one vehicle overpass. In protest, some 300 citizens piled into buses and traveled to the state capital, Jefferson City; there they argued before the highway commission for an additional overpass.

The commission said no, and the residents cannily decided to turn the problem into an "Italian issue." When Secretary of Transportation John Volpe visited St. Louis on another matter. Polizzi requested a meeting and pressed for the overpass in the same, formal Italian that Volpe had learned back home in Massachusetts. Joe Garagiola began dropping hints that he might not be available any more on the Republican banquet circuit unless the Hill got its overpass. Finally Polizzi led a Hill delegation to Washington with a check for $50,000, raised by the residents themselves, to pay for the overpass. The Hill got its bridge, and the bells of St. Ambrose rang out the good news.

Polizzi has joined 1,100 of the area's 1,500 families in a nonprofit development corporation to guide the future of the area. In its four years' existence, the corporation has found 60 jobs for new -and old-residents in the neighborhood's salami and macaroni factories, tool company and glass factory. It has set up a summer youth program and hired students at $1 an hour to spruce up the area. The students redecorated the Hill's hydrants and trash cans in red, white and green (the colors of the Italian flag). More than 1,000 trees have been planted. A system of block workers set up by the corporation makes certain that leftover ravioli lands in, not outside the garbage cans. The corporation maintains a list of Italians eager to move onto the Hill. When houses be come vacant, it often refurbishes and resells them at low cost to young couples.

The money for many of these projects comes from the approximately $50,000 earned at an annual summer festival, which draws 100,000 visitors.

The aroma of lasagna and meat balls fills the air, and amateur Carusos croon over the loudspeakers. There are grape-stomping contests and a step-by-step demonstration of how to make sfinge, an Italian confection. At the evening's end a spray of fireworks flares over the neighborhood as proud residents and guests clap and cheer, aware that they have seen the past and that on the Hill at least, it still works.

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