St. Louis: Pride on "the Hill"

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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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