Yesterday I got an alarming email from a reader, who wrote: "David's Shoe Repair at 74 East 7th Street is closing this week after 28 years in business. Same old story: landlord wants to double the rent. Just walked in with a pair of shoes that needed fixing. He said I'd have to pick them up before the end of the week."
I've been worrying about David's for awhile now, but all is not (yet) lost.
Last night I went by to talk with the cobbler. From what I could understand, he's not sure what's happening with his lease, but he hopes to last until after the new year, perhaps until July, as long as he can sell and repair enough shoes to pay that new rent.
He needs your business, so go to David's. He even sells those trendy little Worishofer clogs, and recently I noticed he had some items from the Paris Hilton Footwear collection. Anything to stay alive.
Over the years, he has fixed many soles and heels for me. He has shined my shoes and replaced their laces. But he will only take a pair, never just one shoe. Try giving him just one shoe and he'll say, "I can't take one shoe! My wife will die!"
A cobbler's superstition, I guess.
David's shop goes back in time. It has the best Cat's Paw decal in the window. She looks like a 1940s girl, yellowed with age. While David's has been in this storefront for 28 years, it's been a shoe repair shop for much longer.
You can see the decal here too, back when David's was A. Brym's shoe repair shop. This photo is from the book The Lower East Side, by Edmund V. Gillon, Jr. I think it's from the 1960s:
After it was Brym's, it made a 1980s appearance in Moscow on the Hudson, its yellow sign printed partly in Cyrillic lettering. Not yet David's, but still a shoe repair shop.
Yes, that's an egg shop on the block. You can watch a movie of the shop and read about it here. And while we're talking about the recent wave of transformation on 7th Street (Addukkan and more), here's another vintage shot, this one from Brian Rose's fantastic Lower East Side Project:
This place is still a tailor/dry cleaners; though, like David's, it has changed hands and design elements many times over the years. Note in all these photos the tenement doorways with the decorated marble columns. They really knew how to make affordable housing back in the day. They also knew how to fix your shoes.
where is the shoe repair chain store? There is a nice stretch of small businesses on Bleecker between Broadway and Lafayette including an old cigar store (with Optimo sign), shoe repair store, closed Chinese takeout, photo store and a fine Two Boots. Centrally located for all your average human needs!
ReplyDeleteMy ex-boyfriend, now late ex-boyfriend, lived upstairs on the fourth floor, and he too was named David. A coincidence? I wonder. I seem to remember a wonderful pottery shop called Sexwick Pottery, in that building or perhaps next door...run by potters Leif Wicklund and Barbara Sexton, some of whose pieces are now in the Smithsonian. And some of which I have. They closed the shop in the 70's and moved their wares to Mad Monk on 6th Avenue and 12th, until that place too closed...absolutely gorgeous stuff.
ReplyDeleteThe Jersey Egg store! Thank you, I've missed this place. I was just talking about it yesterday, saying that the EV used to have so much character and charm (relatively recently!)because a shopowner could have a shop that was simply fresh eggs, milk, butter and coffee and still manage to make a living here and stick around because no massive investment groups and mega-developers were looking to snatch up all the property by paying their way into anything they wanted. We're losing NYC, people. Please shop local and independent; save whatever still remains.
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