Faces of The Hill

Stories and Photos by Carmen Troesser

Rich LoRusso

Rich LoRusso, owner of LoRusso's Cucina.

Carmen Troesser

The childhood home of Rich LoRusso, owner of LoRusso’s Cucina, was a half block from Ruggeri’s Restaurant. “Back in the day, it was the St. Louis hotspot,” he says. “It was the neighborhood of Mickey Garagiola, Joe Garagiola, Yogi Berra. All those guys worked there as waiters from time to time. There was just a super buzz in that area. As boys, we’d go up there and hold the door for customers, and they’d give us a nickel. Then we’d get an order of french fries and sit across the street and watch.”

“People not from The Hill see the value of being on The Hill,” he says, looking in the direction of the new Piazza Imo, scheduled to be completed this year equipped with fountains and imported Italian marble. “They’re buying properties and tearing them down and building new ones. People are recognizing the value of the neighborhood and they’re coming.”

Sitting in the dining room at LoRusso’s, he talks of his grandmother and eats panzanella salad made with tomatoes from his garden. “She would bake her bread and trade it for produce, and that was just how you did things. It’s a close community. And the church, the church was the center of everything. It was our universe.” He puts down his fork, grabs a spoon and digs into a half-cut watermelon. “The memories here just built you.”

Ben & Gloria Gambaro

Gloria and Ben Gambaro, of Missouri Baking Co.

Carmen Troesser

Gloria and Ben Gambaro, both 94, have known each other their whole lives and still banter like sixth graders flirting over math homework. “God must’ve punished me by making me take care of him for 68 years,” Gloria teases.

Punishment for avoiding dates with Yogi Berra, apparently. “He used to always ask me out, and I’d say, ‘OK, Yogi.’ And then when he’d come to the house, I’d say, ‘I have a headache, Yogi. Let’s just stay home and play cards.’”

“Remember Joe?” Ben beams back at her. “He had the gift of gab.”

“He’d pick up my books every day and walk me home from school,” Gloria says of her former suitor. “He was the perfect gentleman.” She turns away from Ben to say, low enough for him to miss it, “Isn’t he handsome? He was always such a handsome man. Pals forever.”

Their forever is a treasure trove of Hill stories. Ben’s father started as a partner with the Missouri Baking Co. in 1924, after prominent St. Louis restaurateur Joe Garavelli asked him to leave Italy and make bread for him. However, shortly after the bakery opened, when Ben was only 4, his mother became ill, and the family moved back to Italy for four years. “When we went back to Italy, people there said, ‘Here come the Americans,’” he recounts. “When we came back, they said, ‘Here come the Italians.’”

Ben and Gloria were married in 1949 at St. Ambrose Catholic Church with the bridesmaids wearing dresses Gloria made herself. “I wanted to make my wedding dress, too, but they said that was bad luck,” she says.

She continued sewing for people while Ben went to work at the bakery every day. For a while, they lived with three children in two rooms rented from a local gambler. “He’d charge us $25 a month for rent, utilities, everything,” Gloria says. When No. 4 came along, they moved into a house with three bedrooms. Then two more children came. “I told my husband, I think we need to get a bigger house. So every Sunday, that was his only day off from the bakery, we’d go out and look. On the third Sunday, the children said, ‘We’re sick and tired of this! We like where we’re living, and we want to stay there.’ So I said, ‘That’s it! We’re gonna make the best of it.’” They’ve been in the home ever since.

Nightly family dinners took place around a small, round dining table, a wedding present they still use today. The kids knew to run home when they heard the factory whistles go off on Marconi Avenue at 4:30 p.m. – you could hear them throughout the entire neighborhood. If they didn’t make it home by 5 p.m., the kids would be in big trouble.

“That was the only time Ben saw the children,” Gloria says. “He worked hard his whole life.” All six children also worked in the bakery growing up, although Ben and Gloria didn’t want them to stay. “I only went to grade school, and I wanted my children to have an education,” she says. “I sent them to high school and college.” Those educations have paid off. The bakery is going strong with the fourth generation working there now.

Joe Barbaglia

Joe Barbaglia, mastermind behind The Dogaloni, a hot dog rolled in cannelloni dough and deep fried.

Carmen Troesser

Some people call him Mayor Joe Barbaglia. Considering everything he does for the neighborhood, it’s hard to imagine he actually owns his own business and has time to work there. His office at Southwest Auto Parts is papered with photos of his beloved daughter Nina Barbaglia, Monsignor Vince Bommarito, police officers and firefighters, parades and others who make up the fabric of his life lived on The Hill. A native, Barbaglia heads up The Hill’s Easter egg hunt, the soapbox derby, the fireworks at Sublette Park, the Christmas lights on Marconi Avenue, the Columbus Day parade, the St. Ambrose golf tournament and the Giro Della Montagna, an annual bike race in the Gateway Cup series.

But his biggest claim to fame may be the product of his time working on the Giro: The Dogaloni. “We had this hot dog, and we had cannelloni dough – rolled the hot dog in the dough, breaded and deep fried them and served them on a stick. When we bring ’em out there, people love ’em. We sold about 600 at the race, and we kept making them for the next five years. People still ask for them.”

It only makes sense that Barbaglia would dream up such a successful Hill novelty. He praises the area at every opportunity. “It’s probably the best neighborhood you could grow up in in your life. It’s like being in a small town, so tight-knit with family and friends. The volunteers here are over-the-top.

If you have $10 or $1,000, everybody pitches in and makes things happen. That’s what it’s all about … helping each other and not worrying about what’s in it for me.”

He admits, however, that The Hill hasn’t always been perfectly harmonious. The long-time rivalry between the Sicilians and the Lombards was strong when his parents met. “My dad was Lombard; my mom was Sicilian. Back then a Sicilian didn’t marry a Lombard. But it was OK because my dad was the kind of person who would help anybody. I remember he’d go over to an older lady’s house and help her fix things. She’d try to pay him and he’d say, ‘Just say a prayer for me.’ He’d fix it all.”

Being the product of a union between the Lombards and the Sicilians made Barbaglia a human bridge between northerners, southerners and non- Italians alike. Perhaps none of his rituals speaks that more clearly than the bread.

“I go to Vitale’s every Friday, and they give me loaves of bread. I take them to Milo’s, and regular people all break bread and hand it around. And it’s hot – so hot you can barely touch it. When you break it open, it fills the place with smells. People come from as far away as Arnold for it. Things like this, there’s nothing like it. It’s something you can’t purchase. You can purchase a new car, a new house, but you can’t purchase what we have. It’s not available like that. It’s something you gain over the years – trust in people.”

Nina Barbaglia

Nina Barbaglia, daughter of Joe Barbaglia, a teacher.

Carmen Troesser

Twenty-six-year-old Nina Barbaglia sits in sawdust in her home on Sublette Avenue. She positions herself near a window that faces south, the direction of her father Joe Barbaglia’s house. “He’s the most generous person I know,” she says. “It doesn’t get better than him.” So this is where she sits when she needs to think. The teacher bought the duplex recently. She’s renovating the south side for herself and renting the other.

Barbaglia remembers walking home from St. Ambrose School with a pack of 12 friends. “We had a route where we’d drop everybody off – me and Regina Savio were always the last ones. And now, she bought a house right around the corner from mine.” At a time in her life when a lot of her friends are moving around the country, choosing school districts and moving to the suburbs, she’s staying put – at least for now.

“I can talk about school districts being the most important thing when I have kids someday, but is it the most important? Or is it being close to family and close to everything, you know? That’s a hard decision.

“In the suburbs, you get the big house and the good school, but you don’t get the meaning of the house you’re living in. You don’t know who’s living next door to you. Who lived there before? There’s so much history around here. It’s good to know that other people had family and happy memories in this house, and I can personally talk to those people. To know that somebody started their family here or somebody’s life ended here gives a whole meaning to the house.”

Here on The Hill, people stay. “I lived in my dad’s house my whole life. My dad moved straight from his parents’ house into that house. So thinking of moving was terrifying. I couldn’t even think about moving away to college because my grandma was older, and I didn’t want to miss a single minute.” Her grandmother did pass away last year, and she carries a picture of her in her purse. “Sometimes I feel a lot like her. Like an old Italian lady trapped in a young body.”

Monsignor Vince Bommarito

Monsignor Vince Bommarito first Mass on The Hill was more than 40 years ago.

Carmen Troesser

Stepping into the St. Ambrose Catholic Church rectory, that center of The Hill universe, you could just as easily be stepping off an Italian piazza into a high-end antique shop, one with gold-framed landscape paintings, ornate sculptures, dark-stained furniture and a faint but welcoming smell of olives and cologne. With a quick gesture of his hand, Monsignor Vince Bommarito welcomes you into his residence behind the church, where he will undoubtedly lead you into the dining room.

Bommarito celebrated his first Mass here more than 40 years ago. He’s left the parish and come back a few times, but his latest stint is 19 years and counting. Over the last 35 years, he’s raised money for the Italian Open, a children’s charity, by auctioning off dinners in his home. Eight to 10 people sit around the table as the monsignor serves course after course of his Sicilian specialties.

“We start out with a number of appetizers. We usually have a shrimp or fish dish. I always make a frittata with spinach and asparagus. Then we’ll have various cheeses and salamis and some fried mushrooms. Then we’ll make a pasta dish, and for the main course, we’ll make chicken marsala and we’ll roast spiedini. The only place to get spiedini meat in St. Louis is DiGregorio’s. They do it special, and I always get center cuts. After that, we have salads and cookies from Missouri Bakery or Vitale’s. That’s a typical dinner here.”

He attributes his skill to his mother. “You know, Sicilian mothers cook all the time, and the kitchen is the big place where everybody hangs,” he says. “You just watch your mother cook, and you learn to cook from watching her. Then you might break out and do your own thing.” But doing his own thing doesn’t mean straying far. “I don’t use cream in my sauces. I’m Sicilian.”

He prefers shopping and cooking at home to going out for dinner. “I love to go to stores because I sit and talk to people,” he says. But he still frequents restaurants on The Hill. “If I want liver and onions, I go to Lorenzo’s. If I’m in the mood for pizza, I go to Favazza’s – because he’s developed a pizza dough that’s very, very good. It took him two years to develop this dough. Then if I want calamari, I’ll go to Charlie Gitto’s. Don’t ask me what my favorite restaurant is. I don’t have a favorite because they’re all so good.”

Monsignor Bommarito sits at the center of this universe, seemingly content with knowing he nourishes people in more than one way at his table. “You have to understand The Hill. The Hill doesn’t understand you; you understand The Hill. We’re blessed here.”

Joe DeGregorio

Joe DeGregorio is a native of The Hill.

Carmen Troesser

If you spend any time on The Hill, you’re likely to run into Joe DeGregorio on the street – a stack of business cards in his hand, newspaper clippings and brochures tucked under his arm, and a carryout box in his other hand. He’s a walking, talking atlas, encyclopedia and advertisement of The Hill, able to rattle off the menu and address of every deli and restaurant.

Today he’s lunching at Milo’s. Looking around, he can pick out half the people in the room. Some he went to school with, others are cousins. “My childhood here, for a typical American, was not typical,” he says. “We watched the ‘Howdy Doody Show,’ played cowboys and Indians and battle – did all the things American kids did in the 1950s and ’60s.”

What made his childhood less typical for a city kid was The Dump – the dumping grounds for the 1904 World’s Fair and hospitals in the area, conveniently located within 50 yards of his home. It was his friends’ playground where they’d chase rabbits, catch pigeons, make bows and arrows – never thinking it was out of the norm.

He was the oldest of seven children. “What was important to us was the sense of family, the Catholic faith and, my golly, the food. The food – looking back, it was the highlight of my youth.”

His father worked two jobs, one as the mailman on The Hill and the second as a waiter. He had a 30-minute break for dinner at 4:45 p.m., and the children were expected to be there for it. “We’d see him off to the restaurant at 5:15. It was a standing rule to do that. Mom would make all the traditional Italian food with a Sicilian slant to it but not pizza. Pizza wasn’t that paramount in the United States yet.”

After school, DeGregorio left The Hill and worked around the world as a federal agent. He retired in 2005 and decided to return to his roots. “Here I am, retired and having my Dustin Hoffman ‘[The] Graduate’ movie moment. Which, for us baby boomers, means it’s summertime, I just retired and what the hell am I going to do with the rest of my life?”

He decided to help his father with The Hill tours that he’d led for about 25 years. He’s since added culinary elements like ravioli-making demonstrations, as well as bocce lessons, concerts at the church and visits to an artisanal salami factory. He talks extensively about the very important distinction between the Lombards and the Sicilians. “They’re totally different cultures, totally different people and totally different culinary styles. The Lombards are heavy on cream and butter dishes, cheeses, salamis, polenta and even some German-like rabbit stews. Sicilian food is more Mediterranean-style food, more seafood and pork-based.”

He admits he’s eaten at every restaurant on The Hill, which at his latest count is 28. “There’s a tremendous variety of Italian food here. If you’re in the mood for good old-fashioned slop-it-down 1950s American-Italian food, you go to Rigazzi’s. That’s John Goodman’s favorite place. If you want some haute cuisine, you go to Dominic’s. That’s Tony Bennett’s favorite place. Or Giovanni’s, Oprah’s favorite place. If you want some casual Italian food, you go to Milo’s. If you want to go to the northern Italian genre, Lorenzo’s – tremendous rice dishes. Gian-Tony’s has the best and most authentic Southern-style Italian in the city.”

Lunch is over, and he packs up his salad in a to-go box. He tucks his brochures under his arm, grabs his business cards, offers a farewell gesture to the room, and heads across the street to Gelato Di Riso.