It’s nervy to call something the last of anything, especially when it comes to neighborhoods. But as residents of The Hill in St. Louis see it, their community isn’t just the city’s Little Italy—it’s the last one in all of America.
Scusi? What was that? You can almost hear the recriminations and curses coming from North Beach in San Francisco and Bloomfield in Pittsburgh and various communities in Chicago. Surely Little Italy in New York — the Little Italy! — has something to say about this ingiustizia.
Turns out, maybe not.
“We thought New York was going to be the hardest on us and they were going to be the ones slighted by the title, but it’s been 100% the opposite,” Joseph Puleo tells the Star-Revue. Puleo is the director of America’s Last Little Italy: The Hill, a gentle 70-minute documentary about the community that’s more love letter than provocation. “We’ve had more people from New York and New Jersey who are in love with the film and want to now come visit The Hill.”
That shouldn’t be surprising. Traditional Little Italies, like North Beach and New York’s, are shadows of their former selves, more tourist trap than ethnic enclave. In New York’s case, the neighborhood of tenements and festas is a sepia-toned memory (brought to you by Barilla pasta!). The children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of early 20th century Italians who colonized that swath of Manhattan long ago abandoned it for their acre of the American Dream on Long Island or in Jersey. That generational exodus left Little Italy vulnerable to encroachment from Soho to the north and Chinatown to the south, squeezing it into oblivion. Italian grocers, cafes, and enotecas still exist, but fewer and fewer Italians actually live there. So who’s left to keep it “Italian”—and to quibble with the title of a documentary?
But while New York’s Little Italy has primarily become a civic marketing tool, The Hill in St. Louis has held tight to its Italian Main Street sensibility. The 52-square-block neighborhood is the kind of walkable, everything-you-need-is-here community that seems to only exist on television, with trattorias, bakeries, and sandwich joints dotting a residential community of squat single-family homes. “Right off the bat that’s so different from what you see with a typical Little Italy,” Puleo says. “The Hill remains a cocoon. There’s definitely a throwback feel when you visit the neighborhood. It doesn’t feel like you’re in 2021. It has an older world feel to it.”
Immigrants from Sicily and northern Italy were attracted to St. Louis in the late 19th century by the city’s clay mines and brickmaking plants. The Italians who worked in the industry colonized The Hill, and by the early 20th century were the dominant ethnic group. The first wave to arrive built homes, opened businesses, and had families — very big families. They also established St. Ambrose Catholic Church, which became, and remains, the emotional center of The Hill. (The current church opened in 1926 and is still the tallest structure in the neighborhood.)
As time passed, the children of those first immigrants, then later their children, grew up and stayed in The Hill to remain close to their parents and extended network of cousins, friends, and neighbors. It wasn’t immune to ancient rivalries from the old country — the Sicilians and northers who came over didn’t get along, and while they tried passing that animosity down it faded as their kids mixed in school, at church, and on the playground. Nor was The Hill spared the currents of history. During Prohibition residents turned to bootlegging, converting sub-basements into moonshine distilleries. Many of its young men volunteered to serve in World War II; not all of them came home. Post-war suburbanization and white flight threatened to hollow out The Hill, before St. Ambrose’s Monsignor Salvatore Polizzi created intervention programs to retain residents and beautify the neighborhood. Polizzi was also instrumental in retaining the integrity of The Hill after an interstate highway bisected its northern tip.
The Hill also left a national footprint in the form of New York Yankees great Yogi Berra and St. Louis Cardinals hero Joe Garagiola. Both catchers and Hill natives, Berra and Garagiola grew up on the same street, were friends, and honed their skills in pickup games and on church teams — often against one another. They were too good to be on the same team; no one else stood a chance. Still, Garagiola remembered, “Not only was I not the best catcher in the Major Leagues, I wasn’t even the best catcher on my street!”
But don’t just take his word for it. One of the joys of America’s Last Little Italy is hearing from Hill lifers who grew up with Berra and Garagiola. More than burnishing the legends, they add memories and dimensions to ballplayers who have become larger than life and, in Berra’s case, iconic.
“These guys had never been interviewed before,” Puleo says. “These are stories they’ve told their families for the past 60 or 70 years, but now they have the opportunity to tell them on camera. And you can just see them come to life telling these stories.” That’s something Puleo saw often while making his film. He interviewed some 70 Hill residents, 30 over the age of 80, “and time and time again they lit up remembering the past and remembering this history. For us, it was an incredible experience.”
It’s also essential to the documentary’s success. What elevates America’s Last Little Italy above a regional-interest production are the memories of multiple generations of Hill residents. When word got out that Puleo was making the film, he didn’t have much trouble getting people to talk to him. (It helped that his family has ties to the neighborhood and he spent his youth in and around the community.) Nor did he have problems getting photos and old home movies — material captured with no expectation of ever being seen by anyone outside the family. “It was just an embarrassment of riches for me to go through,” Puleo says. “The film has a sense of authenticity because of that.”
Indeed, the documentary is a fine tapestry of the neighborhood. But it’s also an act of cultural preservation. Many of the people Puleo interviewed grew up with the immigrants who shaped The Hill; others are immigrants themselves. They are primary sources to history. Nearly a dozen of the people Puleo spoke with for the film, which he began making in 2018, have since died. And while that adds poignancy to their participation, it also reiterates the value of capturing and preserving their memories. More than a necessity to telling this story, it’s a boon to our understanding of the immigrant experience.
“Oftentimes, when you’re Italian, what you see portrayed is food and The Sopranos and that type of idea,” Puleo says. “I never wanted the Italians in our film to be portrayed as caricatures or that typical idea people have when they think about Italians.”
As a first-generation Italian American, I understand well the need to overcome the stereotypes. I also know the significance of talking with your elders about what they went through, in Italy and America, and regretting you didn’t ask enough questions while they were here. Even though my Italian kin settled in Western Pennsylvania, the similarities between them and the Italians of The Hill is striking, from laboring in brickyards to recreating a slice of the old country in their new one to challenges of ensuring future generations appreciate the foundation left for them. It all conspired to create an unexpectedly moving viewing experience.
Is The Hill the last of America’s Little Italies? Who knows. Maybe. The character and composition of our cities is changing — demographically, economically, politically — as they always have and always will. Don’t dwell on it. Sure, calling his film America’s Last Little Italy might sound like Puleo wants to instigate an argument. But the documentary is instead an invitation — into a neighborhood, certainly, but for Italians into a conversation with our heritage.
“I’ve always been prideful of being Italian,” Puleo says. “But hearing these incredible stories from these elderly people that I respect so much — it was a learning experience for me. To be there with these people, throughout all these interviews, if it was possible to be even more prideful about being Italian, that that’s the case now.”
America’s Last Little Italy: The Hill is currently available on DVD and for rent or purchase on Amazon Prime Video.
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