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Sicilian Culture: News & Views
A Downtown Cobbler Gets Back on His
Insoles
By Andrew Jacobs, New York Times (Lower Manhattan Journal)
January 20, 2002 - - Heavy foot traffic, the old saying goes, fills a shoe cobbler with joy. Well, O.K., there really is no such saying, but it is a truism that has served Salvatore Iacono well during the 35 years he has mended, stitched and shined the shoes of Lower Manhattan's shuffling masses.
The son of a Sicilian shoemaker, Mr. Iacono, 67, has done well on Barclay Street, where he tends tattered soles with the zeal of a charismatic preacher. "If it looks, smells or feels like leather, I can fix it," said Mr. Iacono, cradling a broken heel as if it were a wounded sparrow.
Like many downtown business owners, Mr. Iacono's talents have gone underappreciated in recent months, victim to the chaos and depopulation that have drained the area of its former vitality. With local streets blocked off and business nearly nonexistent, Mr. Iacono was forced to lay off the shop's other shoemaker of 17 years; there were days so slow, so dark, he contemplated packing up his antique foot- powered sewing machine.
The shop, half a block from the World Trade Center, was closed for six weeks after Sept. 11 and it took thousands of dollars in savings to clean up the soot and vandalism that left Continental Shoe Repair in shambles. Even with the barricades gone from Barclay Street, the ground zero tourists who pass by in their sensible walking shoes rarely step through his doors.
But this is not another sad story about terrorism's cruel aftermath. Instead, it is a tale of how a civic- minded lawyer and countless strangers rallied to save a neighborhood institution from oblivion.
Over the past month, the lawyer, Ms. Hollis Gonerka Bart, has sent hundreds of messages by e-mail to her friends, clients and business associates, urging them to bring their wretched footwear to Mr. Iacono's shop.
Accountants at Ernst & Young have been pouring in with bags of worn-out wingtips, and even recovery workers from around the corner have walked in bearing their gnarled and dusty Timberlands.
Three weeks ago a Canadian lawyer visiting the city showed up with a beloved boot, its heel shorn in half. "She said that no one in Toronto could fix it," Mr. Iacono recalled. " `Sal, can you save them?' I told her, `Nothing's impossible.' " The woman gave him a $20 tip.
In addition to drumming up more foot traffic, Ms. Gonerka Bart, a business lawyer with the firm Ross & Hardies, has been helping Mr. Iacono navigate the bureaucratic hurdles that stand in the way of federal relief grants and insurance reimbursements.
The two met one Saturday in November, when Ms. Gonerka Bart was volunteering at the victims' assistance center on Worth Street. Mr. Iacono walked up to the City Bar Association's legal advice table looking like a broken man.
"He was so downtrodden, he just pushed a folder my way and said, `Can you help me?' " she remembered. "The man you see today is not the man I met."
When Mr. Iacono returned to his shop on Sept. 16, he was stunned to find that firefighters had crashed through the doors to use it as a trauma center. But the real destruction took place after they left. The glass countertop was shattered and looters smashed open the cash register and stole the $1,400 inside. The umbrellas and shoe polish tins that had lined the walls were also gone.
"Everything was black," he said.
Then there were the men sleeping on the floor, although Mr. Iacono would not say who they were. "Let's just say they were people who are supposed to enforce the law," he said respectfully.
But Mr. Iacono hates to dwell on the past. Garrulous and endlessly gesticulating, these days he acts like the lead character in the musical "The Most Happy Fella," greeting his customers as if they were long-lost relations.
Many are like Tony Mayer, 46, an architect from the Upper West Side who walked in with a dog-eared briefcase. "He's just amazing," said Mr. Mayer, who keeps coming back even though he now works in Queens.
It was painfully quiet at noon Friday (a shoeshine man's rush hour), but Mr. Iacono was bubbling with optimism. Business is still down 40 percent, but Ms. Gonerka Bart's campaign has yielded enough work to bring back his employee, Herman Garcia. "I love, love, love my customers and I love what I do," his Sicilian cadence sounding operatic. "I feel like I'm in a Broadway show."
What kind of show? he was asked.
"One with a happy ending."
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- February 19,
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