Lou Costello place of birth Paterson
Early life
Louis Francis Cristillo was born on March 6, 1906, in Paterson, New Jersey, the son of Helen Rege and Sebastiano Cristillo, a silk weaver and insurance sales agent. His father was Italian, from Caserta in Campania, Italy, and his mother was an American of Italian, French and Irish ancestry (her grandfather was Francesco Rege from Piedmont, Italy). Costello attended Public School 15 in Paterson and was considered a gifted athlete. He excelled in basketball and reportedly was twice Paterson's free-throw champion. His basketball prowess can be seen in Here Come the Co-Eds (1945), in which he performs his own trick basketball shots. He also fought as a boxer under the name of Lou King.Memorials
In 1946, Costello was joined by Abbott to fund the Lou Costello Jr. Youth Foundation, a 3.3-acre recreation center  on Olympic Blvd. in the Boyle Heights district of Los Angeles. Opened on May 3, 1947, it included a baseball field and swimming pool. In 1951 the center was sold to the city for less than one-third of its cost, and the name was changed to the Lou Costello Jr. Youth Recreation Center.On June 26, 1992, the city of Paterson, New Jersey, in conjunction with the Lou Costello Memorial Association, erected a statue of Costello in the newly named Lou Costello Memorial Park in the city's historic downtown section. It shows Costello holding a baseball bat, a reference to the team's most famous routine, "Who's on First?". The statue has been shown in two episodes of The Sopranos and in the film Paterson (2016). In 2005, Madison Street, in the Sandy Hill section of Paterson where Costello was born, was renamed Lou Costello Place.The centennial of Costello's birth was celebrated in Paterson in March 2006. From June 24 to 26, 2006, the Fort Lee Film Commission held a centennial film retrospective at the Fine Arts Theatre in Hollywood. Films screened included the premiere of a digital film produced by the teenagers of the present-day Lou Costello Jr. Recreation Center in East Los Angeles. Also premiered was a 35 mm restored print of the Costello-produced 1948 short film 10,000 Kids and a Cop, which was shot at the Lou Costello, Jr. Youth Center in East Los Angeles.In 2009, Costello was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.Abbott and Costello are among the few non-baseball personnel to be memorialized in the Baseball Hall of Fame, although they are not formal inductees. A plaque and a gold record of the "Who's on First?" sketch have been on permanent display there since 1956, and a video of the routine loops endlessly in the exhibit area.
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