Filmed on Wednesday, March 22, 2023, I drive around the St. Louis Neighborhood "The Hill" to see what's going on.
The Hill is a neighborhood within St. Louis, Missouri, located on high ground south of Forest Park.
The Hill began with immigrants from Northern Italy, Germany, Ireland, and African-Americans who wanted to live near the railroad which connected the neighborhood to downtown. The vast numbers of Italians migrating to the area resulted in an Italian American majority population during the early part of the 20th century. Historically, it is a predominantly blue collar neighborhood.
Its name is due to its proximity to the highest point of the city, formerly named St. Louis Hill, which is a few blocks outside the neighborhood's boundaries.
Various ethnic groups existed in the area in the mid-19th century. Italians, mainly from the north and especially from the northern Italian region of Lombardy, 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 Irish immigrants in the 1830s.
Due to the increasing number of Italian speakers, the parish of St. Ambrose was founded by members of St. Aloysius Gonzaga Parish in what later came to be known as the Hill in 1903 to serve primarily the recent Lombard immigrants. After the first wooden church burned in 1924, a brick church was built in 1926. The structure, designed by architect Angelo Corrubia, was modeled after the Sant'Ambrogio Church in Milan, in a Lombard Romanesque Revival style of brick and terra cotta. Residents took pride in their parish and donated funds for the new church. It became a territorial parish of the Archdiocese of St Louis in 1955, after existing as a personal ethnic parish until that time.
Baseball greats Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola Sr. grew up on the Hill; their boyhood homes are across the street from each other on Elizabeth Avenue.
According to Garagiola's book Baseball Is a Funny Game, during his youth, the Hill was called "Dago Hill," the term "dago", a disparaging and offensive term used to refer to a person of Italian descent. The Hill was also well known to African-Americans, for during the era of Prohibition and bootlegging, the area had an African-American enclave that produced a number of blues songs that referenced The Hill.
In 1926, the blues singer Luella Miller recorded "Dago Hill Blues" about the area.
In 1929, the pseudonymous blues singer Freezone recorded "Indian Squaw Blues" in which he sang, "I'm gonna buy me a mansion, I'm gonna live on Dago's Hill / So I can get my whiskey, honey, right from the still."
In 1932, Tampa Red and Georgia Tom Dorsey sang of the Hill and its connection to illegal liquor in "You Can't Get That Stuff No More" - "stuff" being a reference to alcohol.
In 1934, Charlie Patton mentioned the Hill in his single "Love My Stuff," a song in which "stuff" again means liquor.
In 1935, the North Carolina blues musician Blind Boy Fuller made reference to the Hill in his song "Log Cabin Blues".
In 2020 The Hill's racial makeup was 90.4% White, 2.5% Black, 0.2% Native American, 1.1% Asian, 4.5% Two or More Races, and 1.2% Some Other Race. 3.3% of the people were of Hispanic or Latino origin. #driving #travel #drivingtour
13 апр 2023
