Who remembers shoe repair? 60 year ago, these businesses dotted the Triple Cities

For me, there is always something fun and interesting about plowing through a volume of the city directories that were published for this region from the 1860s until the early 1980s.  For this column, I pulled the 1953 volume off the shelves of my bookcases and began to look through the business section of the directory. What a difference 60 years makes in a community.

Aside from the fact that there were a lot more people living in the city of Binghamton then as opposed to today, the sheer number and types of businesses give one pause as to how our world has changed in those six decades. For this column, I picked one category – that of shoe repair establishments to discuss.

First, let’s stop and think about taking a pair of shoes to be repaired today, rather than just buying a new pair of shoes. For most of us, it would almost be anathema to our nature. We live in a disposable society – just throw out the old pair and get some new ones for our feet. Perhaps it is the nature to today, perhaps it relates to the fact that we wear athletic shoes (sneakers), rather than dress shoes.

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There are handful of businesses that still offer repair to shoes to make them usable for a longer period of time. But only a handful. Yet, in 1953, there were 27 such businesses just in the city of Binghamton. If you add in the same type of business located in the villages of Johnson City and Endicott, it brings the total up to 39 shoe repairers in the Triple Cities area.

There were departments for shoe repair located in the major department stores of the day – Fowler’s and McLean’s department stores both offered the service. Yet they were full-service department stores, so that may not seem amazing. What is surprising are the small, family-owned businesses scattered around to this one element of society.

If you scan through the names of the owners, many of the ethnic groups that settled this valley in the first three decades of the 20th century are represented. I found names of Armenian origin, such as Sorkis Arzouian, Megerdich Basmajian, Samuel Durgerian, and Peter Rejebian owning shops for shoe repair. There were Italian families such as Joseph Lomonaco, and Nunzio Risi. There were some that could not be determined just from the name such as Bernie’s Shoe and Zipper Service, Main Shoe Rebuilder, and Nu-Way Shoe Repair (which is still in business and relocated to Johnson City).

Whatever the ethnic origin, it appears that that type of business cut across the spectrum of cultural makeup. Some of these shops offered other services at the same location. Some also sold shoes from many of the American shoe manufacturers at that time, and others also offered shoe shining services – something I would dare say would be hard-pressed to find today.

We should be cognizant that the dress shoes of that period were well-made and created to last a number of years.  The cost of adding a new sole or heel would be less than purchasing a new pair of the same shoe. In my younger days of being a bachelor and having more spendable income than I do today, I wore dress shoes every day in my job at the former Binghamton Public Library on Exchange Street. I took my shoes to Nu-Way shoes, then on Main Street in Binghamton, and had new half soles to replace those that had holes in them. The shoes came back better than I remember, and I wore them for a long period after that.

Yet, like many of us, I switched to walkers and athletic shoes – the victim of being on my feet for many hours each day. And like many of us, when those shoes began to wear out and not provide adequate support, they went the way of so many disposable items in our lives – to be replaced with new shoes in their stead.

That is too bad, the art of shoe repair was, and is, one of pride among those who still practice it in an increasingly hostile world to remade, repaired, and rebuilt. Perhaps there is a lesson there.

Gerald Smith is a former Broome County historian. Email him at historysmiths@stny.rr.com.

This article originally appeared on Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin: Binghamton history: Shoe repair businesses dotted area 60 years ago