The Hill and St. Louis Hills Are About to Share the Same Weekend, Not Just the Same Zip Code

For most of the year, Francis Park and The Hill run on separate clocks. One neighborhood builds its fall around a series of smaller community dates spread across September and October. The other has spent 158 years pointing everything at a single weekend in October. This year, for the first time in recent memory, those two clocks land back to back, and the streets that connect the neighborhoods have picked up enough new stops to make the walk between them worth the trip.

Two neighborhoods, two very different calendars

St. Louis Hills has always organized its fall around Francis Park. The park itself is the anchor, and the events that ring it are relatively young as St. Louis traditions go. The 35th Annual Run for the Hills kicks off September 19 at the intersection of Donovan and Itaska, with a 5K, a one-mile walk, and a kids' race that all funnel money straight back into the park through Friends of Francis Park. A week later, on September 27, the St. Louis Hills Art in the Park festival takes over the same grounds from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. with local artists and food vendors. Then on October 10, Brew in the Lou returns to Francis Park for its 14th year, a beer and spirits tasting that funds scholarships for the 34 schools in the Lutheran Elementary School Association, a network that serves close to 9,700 students and 600 educators across the region.

The Hill does not spread itself across a month. It has one date, and it has had roughly the same date for a century and a half. The Italian Heritage Parade & Festa takes over Berra Park on October 11 this year for its 158th run, complete with a procession, marching bands, and floats. Where Francis Park's calendar reads like a list of newer civic fundraisers, The Hill's single day reads like an institution that predates most of the events around it by generations.

That gap in age is the tell. St. Louis Hills built a fall calendar because it needed one, stacking events to keep Francis Park active across several weekends. The Hill never needed to build anything. It already had a date so established that everything else in the neighborhood, restaurants included, orients around it rather than competing with it.

The six days that finally overlap

Here is what the two calendars look like laid next to each other this year:

Run the dates and the pattern is obvious. Brew in the Lou closes out Francis Park's fall season on a Saturday, and the very next day, The Hill opens its one big weekend at Berra Park. In past years, with the two neighborhoods pulling attention on their own separate weekends, there wasn't much reason to treat them as one outing. This year, the last day of one calendar and the first day of the other sit twenty-four hours apart, which means a resident who wants both doesn't have to pick a weekend. They just have to pick a two-day stretch in early October.

The corridor between them has changed too

A shared weekend only matters if there's a reason to move between the two neighborhoods rather than just pick one. That reason has gotten stronger over the past year, because the streets connecting St. Louis Hills to The Hill have added stops that didn't exist before.

Macklind Avenue has long been the spine that ties the two areas together, running past Anthonino's Taverna at 2225 Macklind, the spot where a plate of toasted ravioli once earned a visit from Guy Fieri's Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives crew. That kind of anchor has been there for years. What's new is what's filled in around it. Inside 2nd Shift Brewing on The Hill, chef John Messbarger opened Mess Hall this spring, a compact British pub menu built around fish and chips, shepherd's pie, and a Buffalo, New York-style roast beef sandwich, the kind of stop that gives a visitor a reason to linger on The Hill before or after the parade rather than treating it as a one-stop destination.

Just as telling is what happened at Collina Eatery, a few blocks over. The restaurant originally opened as Pit Stop, a name meant to nod to the building's old life as a gas station. Guests kept walking in expecting a burger joint or a barbecue counter. The owners renamed it Collina, Italian for hill, and leaned all the way into the neighborhood identity instead of fighting it. It's a small decision, but it says something about how The Hill's food scene is behaving right now: new operators aren't trying to stand apart from the neighborhood's Italian character, they're naming themselves after it.

None of this replaces the old guard. Charlie Gitto's is still doing its Sicilian-rooted baked pastas and Veal Nunzio. Bartolino's, open since 1969, still anchors the strip near the Drury Inn. Adriana's is still slicing Italian subs named after the family matriarch out of its corner shop on Shaw. What's changed is that the space between those institutions and the newer stretch toward St. Louis Hills now has more reasons to stop along the way, instead of driving straight through.

Building an actual weekend out of it

Put the calendar and the corridor together and a specific two-day plan starts to make sense, one that treats the neighborhoods as connected rather than picking a side.

• Saturday, October 10: Start at Francis Park for Brew in the Lou, sampling from the lineup of regional breweries, wineries, and distilleries while the proceeds go toward LESA's scholarship fund.
• Saturday evening: Head north up Macklind toward The Hill and grab dinner at Mess Hall inside 2nd Shift Brewing, or swing by Collina Eatery if pub food isn't the mood.
• Sunday, October 11: Be at Berra Park for the Italian Heritage Parade & Festa, the 158th run of a tradition that has outlasted nearly everything else on either neighborhood's calendar.

That itinerary didn't exist in this shape a few years ago, not because the parade or Francis Park's events are new, but because the connective tissue between them is. A festival that's been running since long before most of the city's current restaurants opened is now sitting one day after a newer, younger civic fundraiser, and the street between them has enough going on to make the whole thing feel like one long weekend instead of two separate errands.

St. Louis Hills and The Hill were never going to merge into one identity. One neighborhood is built around a park and a rhythm of smaller community events. The other is built around a single date that has outlasted generations of everything else around it. But this particular October, the calendar and the corridor agree with each other in a way they haven't before, and that's worth knowing if you live on either side of the line between them.

If you're the kind of resident who tracks these shifts, the small restaurant openings, the way a festival calendar quietly lines up differently than it used to, you already understand your neighborhood better than most listings ever will. When the time comes to talk about what a move in or out of this stretch of South City actually looks like, Susan Hurley Homes has been paying attention to these blocks for a long time. Request a complimentary consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.