Climb the hill above the Mahoning River, past the ghosts of blast furnaces and the brick streets that once shook with the rhythm of the mills, and you arrive at the spiritual home of the Italians in Youngstown, Ohio. They called it Brier Hill. For more than a century it was the city’s unofficial Little Italy, a tight grid of frame houses where the smell of bread dough and red sauce drifted out of communal ovens and the bells of St Anthony’s marked the hours.
The Place
Brier Hill sits on Youngstown’s near north side, a working-class neighbourhood pinned between the Mahoning River and the railroad tracks. It takes its name from the brier-covered hills that the industrialist George Tod settled around 1801, long before coal and iron would remake the valley. The Brier Hill neighbourhood grew up as its own small world before Youngstown absorbed it.
This was never a polished suburb. It was a mill neighbourhood, built for men who worked turns at the furnaces and women who fed large families on thin wages. What it lacked in grandeur it made up for in density of feeling, the kind of place where everyone knew everyone, and the church, the corner store and the kitchen table held the whole community together.
Today Brier Hill is much quieter than it was, thinned by decades of mill closures and demolition. But its name still carries weight across the Mahoning Valley, attached to a style of pizza, a summer festival and a basilica that anchors the memory of an entire immigrant generation.
How It Became Italian
The story of the Italians in Youngstown is inseparable from the story of steel. Brier Hill had iron in its bones before the Italians arrived, with the first furnace opening in 1847 and blast furnaces and rolling mills rising through the 1880s to feed on the local coal.
The First Arrivals
Youngstown’s first Italian immigrants settled in Brier Hill in the late 1800s, drawn by work in the mills that lined the river. They came in the great wave of Italian emigration that crested between roughly 1890 and the immigration restrictions of 1924, leaving the hard hills of the Italian south for the hard hills of north-east Ohio. They were one strand of a much larger immigrant industrial valley that also drew the Poles of Toledo, Ohio and the Finns of Ashtabula, Ohio.
By the early twentieth century, Italians had become the largest immigrant group in Brier Hill, settling alongside Welsh, Irish, German and African American workers, much as they did in the mill and factory towns of the Italians of Worcester, Massachusetts and the Italians of Waterbury, Connecticut. The neighbourhood had grown up half-independent of Youngstown proper, with its own schools, post office and churches, before it was annexed into the city around 1900.
A Church for the Italian Tongue
Faith arrived almost as fast as the immigrants did. In 1898, Bishop Ignatius Horstmann of Cleveland established St Anthony of Padua parish to serve the Italian-speaking Catholics of the Mahoning Valley, drawn from the older St Columba and St Ann congregations.
Father Anthony Petillo became the first resident pastor in May 1898. The fledgling parish bought the former St Ann’s building for 2,500 dollars and began with about 100 families, a number that climbed quickly to 150 under his care. It became one of the oldest Italian parishes in north-east Ohio, and the gravitational centre of Brier Hill life.
The Mills That Made the Wages
The work that paid for all of this was punishing and proud. The Brier Hill Steel Company, and later the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company, ran the furnaces that defined the skyline. The most famous of them, the Jeannette blast furnace, was built in 1917 and 1918 by Brier Hill Steel and named for the daughter of company president W. A. Thomas.
The Jeannette furnace stood ninety feet tall and turned out millions of tons of steel before it ceased production in 1974. It loomed over the neighbourhood until its demolition in January 1997, an industrial cathedral facing the actual one across the rooftops. Bruce Springsteen immortalised it in his song “Youngstown,” with the aching line about “my sweet Jenny.”
Bread, Ovens and the Birth of a Pizza
Out of this hard ground grew one of the most beloved foods in the valley. Brier Hill style pizza was developed by the neighbourhood’s Italian immigrants, with roots traced to the Basilicata region of southern Italy.
The story goes that the city’s neighbourhoods kept communal brick ovens for baking bread. Whatever dough was left over, too small for a proper loaf, became a pizza during the lean years of the Great Depression, dressed with thick tomato sauce, bell peppers and grated romano cheese instead of mozzarella. The style took hold through the 1940s and remains Youngstown’s signature slice to this day.
The Landmarks
Basilica of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and St Anthony of Padua, 1125 Turin Avenue. St Anthony’s is the heart of Brier Hill. The present church building was completed in 1958, and the parish was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. In 2014 the affiliated Our Lady of Mount Carmel was elevated to a minor basilica by Pope Francis, binding the two old Italian parishes into one.
St Anthony School, 1125 Turin Avenue. The parish school opened in 1959, staffed by the Oblate Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It served the children of the neighbourhood until declining enrolment forced its closure in 1995, a quiet marker of how much the population had shrunk.
The site of the Jeannette furnace, along the Mahoning River. For eighty years the Jeannette blast furnace was the largest thing in any Brier Hill resident’s life. Its 1997 demolition, after failed efforts to preserve it, closed the industrial chapter of the neighbourhood and left an open scar where the heat of the valley once concentrated.
Cassese’s MVR, 410 North Walnut Street. The Mahoning Valley Restaurant, known to everyone simply as the MVR, was founded in 1927 by Carmine T. Cassese and is still run by his family. It is famous for its indoor bocce courts, which host one of the largest summer bocce leagues in the country, and for serving Italian-American classics to generations of Youngstowners.
St Anthony’s pizza kitchen, 1125 Turin Avenue. Long after the steel left, parishioners at St Anthony’s kept the neighbourhood’s most venerated tradition alive, turning out hundreds of Brier Hill pizzas a week, most of them made from scratch. The kitchen is part bake sale, part living museum of a recipe born in the Depression.
The ITAM post, Brier Hill. The Italian American War Veterans club, the ITAM post, has long been one of the neighbourhood’s social anchors, a place where the men who worked the mills and served in the wars gathered. It remains a thread connecting the Brier Hill of memory to the present.
Brier Hill Pizza and Wings, 2715 Mahoning Avenue. For those who cannot make it to a church bake sale, the tradition lives on commercially nearby, where the breadlike crust, thick sauce, peppers and romano are served the way the neighbourhood intended. It is one of several valley spots keeping the original style honest.
Where They Came From
Like most Italian Americans of their era, the Italians of Brier Hill came overwhelmingly from the Mezzogiorno, the impoverished south. The major source regions were Calabria, Campania, Basilicata and the neighbouring provinces, places where land was scarce, taxes were heavy and the promise of mill wages across the Atlantic was worth the crossing. The same southern Italian villages fed colonies far beyond Ohio, from the Italians of Rochester, New York to the shoe-factory community of the Italians of Endicott, New York.
The link to Basilicata is preserved in the very recipe of Brier Hill pizza, which carries the imprint of that region’s plain, resourceful cooking. Calabrians and their fellow southerners settled not only in Brier Hill but also in the nearby Coalburg community near Hubbard, where Italian miners had arrived as early as the 1870s.
What drew them was simple and powerful: chain migration. One man would cross, find a turn at the furnace, send word and money home, and soon a brother, a cousin, a whole village street would follow him to the same few blocks above the Mahoning. The result was a neighbourhood that often felt like a southern Italian town transplanted whole, with its dialects, feast days and suspicions intact.
Youngstown Today
The Brier Hill of the present is a smaller, sparser place than the one the immigrants built. The collapse of the steel industry, which began biting in the 1950s and culminated in the catastrophic closures of the 1970s, scattered families to wherever work could be found. Urban renewal and demolition did the rest, hollowing the old grid.
Yet the Italian identity of the place refuses to disappear. Each August, the Brier Hill Italian Festival fills the streets around St Anthony’s with music, food and crowds drawn from across north-east Ohio and western Pennsylvania. It has run for more than thirty years, a deliberate act of remembrance by people who will not let the neighbourhood be forgotten.
For the descendants of those mill families, Brier Hill is now as much an idea as an address. It lives in the pizza ordered by name, in the bocce leagues at the MVR, in the basilica on Turin Avenue and in the festival every late summer. The furnaces are gone, but the Italians in Youngstown left something the mills could not: a culture stubborn enough to outlast the steel that brought them here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where did the Italians in Youngstown first settle?
The Italians in Youngstown first settled in the Brier Hill neighbourhood on the city’s near north side in the late 1800s. They came for work in the iron and steel mills along the Mahoning River, and Brier Hill became known as the city’s unofficial Little Italy.
What is Brier Hill pizza?
Brier Hill pizza is a regional style developed by the Italian immigrants of Brier Hill, with roots traced to Italy’s Basilicata region. It has a breadlike crust, thick tomato sauce, bell peppers and grated romano cheese rather than mozzarella, and is now Youngstown’s best-known style of pizza.
What is St Anthony of Padua Church?
St Anthony of Padua, at 1125 Turin Avenue, is the historic Italian parish at the centre of Brier Hill. It was established in 1898 to serve Italian-speaking Catholics, its present building was completed in 1958, and it is now part of the Basilica of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and St Anthony of Padua Parish.
Why did Italians come to Youngstown?
Most came from southern Italy, especially Calabria, Campania and Basilicata, where land and work were scarce. They were drawn to Youngstown by jobs at the Brier Hill mills and the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company, often following relatives and fellow villagers through chain migration.
Is there still an Italian festival in Brier Hill?
Yes. The Brier Hill Italian Festival takes place each August around St Anthony’s Church, with Italian food, music and crowds from across the region. It has been held for more than thirty years and is the neighbourhood’s most visible living tradition.
What happened to the steel mills near Brier Hill?
The Brier Hill and Youngstown Sheet and Tube works that employed generations of Italian families declined from the 1950s and largely closed in the 1970s. The landmark Jeannette blast furnace, built in 1917 and 1918, stopped production in 1974 and was demolished in 1997.
If your family’s story passed through Youngstown, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a hill town in Calabria or Basilicata to a frame house above the Mahoning, to wherever you are now.