Eddi at Emilio's Shoe Repair on DeKalb Avenue the cobbler saves shoes here. Lara is the seamstress extraordinaire. The unknown owner of the building who rejected all sale offers for the two buildings from their real estate corporation. Why? Wier wisst?
The two continue their lives. A service to humanity. Saving old shoes and clothing. They are friends to everyone.
Here's a good article from https://laniconway.wordpress.com/ 2011
Sole Man: One Brooklyn shoe cobbler holds the secrets of a dying tradition.
Shoe repairman, Eddie Sulaymanov, 58, is the owner of Emilio Shoe Repair in Fort Greene, Brooklyn Shoe repair is in Eddie Sulaymanov’s blood.
Like most generational trades which survive by being passed down from father to son, shoe repair was introduced to Sulaymanov when he was 7 years old. Sulaymanov’s father was a shoemaker as was his grandfather; it was only natural that he follow suit. So, in his father’s neighborhood shop in the Siberian town of Novokuznetsk, Sulaymanov spent his time after school polishing shoes for ice cream money.
Twenty years later, in 1980, Sulaymanov opened his Fort Greene shoe repair shop after months of renovations to convert a former diner. He was 27 years old and a recent immigrant from Soviet Russia. And now, with $500-a-month rent to pay and $10,000 of his savings depleted, Sulaymanov needed to make more than ice cream change to survive — he needed customers.
Sulaymanov paced up and down the small DeKalb Avenue store, tears welling up in his eyes. But with any new business, time and patience are required. The first customer finally arrived, followed by the second and third — service with a smile has its benefits. Soon, customers started trickling in one by one to have their tattered and worn kicks resoled, reheeled and polished by the nimble hands of the neighborhood shoe cobbler.
“I took my chances when I opened this place,” Sulaymanov said. “I didn’t know what would happen.”
Shoe consumption in the United States has more than doubled in the last two decades, with the average American buying seven pairs a year. But at the same time, the shoe repair business has plummeted. This could be due to cheaper imported shoes made with synthetic material, which are harder to repair. Or it could be thanks to the advent of the sneaker which are practically unrepairable. Perhaps it is the result of a throw-away society that no longer values long-lasting quality but instead goes for the quick fix of the trend.
Either way, as Americans buy more and more, they fix less and less, making Sulaymanov a member of a dying breed.
Sulaymanov’s shoe repair business is one of roughly 5,000 shoe repair shops left in the country — 12 times fewer than there were in 1945. “It’s a slowly sinking ship,” notes Jim McFarland, the historian for the Shoe Service Institute of America, “and there are about eight different holes in it.”
The age-old tradition of shoe repair is on its last breath. Skillful handicraft is slowly swallowed by the high-tech, mass-production boom, but somehow Sulaymanov has managed to survive — although just barely.
When Sulaymanov first opened 31 years ago, he lost hundreds of dollars waiting five months for his first customer. Today, Sulaymanov’s business experiences a constant flux. On slow days he fixes only five pairs of shoes, Sulaymanov said. On good day, between 20 and 30.
“If you’re professional and work hard people are going to keep coming back.” Sulaymanov said when asked about his thoughts on the shoe repair industry’s decline. “If you want to live, you’ll find a way.”
Everyday at 6:30 a.m., Sulaymanov wakes up in his Brighton Beach home, puts on his signature black T-shirt and makes the one-hour drive in his white 2000 Pontiac to his shop on DeKalb Avenue. By 8 a.m. he inserts a key into the padlock of the iron gate, rolls it up and switches the red neon Open sign on. He then begins resoling shoes, changing heels and stretching boots until closing at 6 p.m.
On Sulaymanov’s work station sits a clutter of hand tools — heel pincers, awls and tack pullers. The first shoe Sulaymanov grabs is a brown woman’s boot. He applies thick cement glue to the welt and attaches a thin rubber sole to the bottom, pressing it firmly down with his thumbs. Sulaymanov, a short, portly man whose hair is nearly white, then cuts off the excess rubber and hammers the sole in place.
“This might look easy, but it’s not,” Sulaymanov said.
Born in Uzbekistan, Sulaymanov moved with his family when he was 6 years old to the south central Siberian town of Novokuznetsk, then a part of Soviet Russia.
With the financial backing of his father, Sulaymanov opened his first shop, Shoe Repair, in Novokuznetsk. He was only 13, but has the black and white photos to prove it. In his cramped store, which was barely big enough for two people to stand, Sulaymanov mended shoes by hand, making $35 to $40 a day implementing the skills handed down to him.
At 18, Sulaymanov left shoe repair behind. He went off to college, dabbled in photojournalism and worked in a photo studio for two years. When he turned 20, he served in the Russian Army, which was mandatory under then Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev.
Three years later Sulaymanov moved to Odessa, Ukraine, married a woman named Tania, and returned to Siberia and to shoe repair.
“I was born a shoemaker,” Sulaymanov said with a wave of his hands. “What else could I do?”
In 1975 he opened what he calls an underground shoe repair shop, not because it was located in the basement of his house, but because operating a private shoe repair shop then was illegal. Sulaymanov not only repaired shoes, but made them – including the high platforms that were requested by women who wanted to keep up with the fashions of the day. “In Russia there was a deficit of everything,” Sulaymanov said.
Before immigrating to Brighton Beach in 1979 with his wife and 1-year-old son, the 25-year-old had a car and a house in Odessa. Now in the United States he had only a few bags to his name.
Sulaymanov and his young family settled with his wife’s relatives in Brighton Beach. He spoke no English, but still ventured to Manhattan to find a job on his first day here.
“Before going out I went to my wife’s relatives and asked them, ‘How do you say I’m looking for a job?’ in English,” Sulaymanov said. He wrote both the English and Russian translation on a card and headed out. He randomly walked into several cobbler shops, held up his card, but was turned down. While making his rounds, he says, he walked into a shoe repair shop near 14th Street and 7th Avenue owned by a Russian immigrant. “Show me what you can do,” the owner said, and Sulaymanov was quickly offered $150 a week working twelve hours a day.
Within six months he had saved enough to rent and renovate the 45-by-15 foot storefront at 102 DeKalb Ave., located two blocks from the nearest subway, on a gritty street lined with brown brick buildings and small mom and pop shops. He purchased his Landis polishing and stitching machines from an old Brooklyn cobbler, who was selling his shop.
When it came time to install a phone line in his shop, he couldn’t afford to pay the deposit, so a friendly neighborhood building owner named Emilio let Sulaymanov use his name. In honor of his good friend, he named his shop Emilio Shoe Repair and opened for business in the winter of 1980.
“People aren’t just going to come right away,” Sulaymanov said. “You have to show yourself, you have to earn it.”
Shoemakers and shoe repairmen have been around for centuries.
“They made shoes before they made the wheel. It’s gotta be one of the oldest trades ever,” said McFarland. “Even the Declaration of Independence signer, Roger Sherman, was a cobbler.”
The United States shoe repair industry gained momentum during the Industrial Revolution of the 1900s, hit its peak during the Great Depression in the 1930s, and began its slow decline shortly after. Before sneakers became an everyday item in the 1940s and 1950s, everyone needed a shoe repairmen — everyone had only one or two good pairs of leather shoes.
Although the recession of the 1980s helped the shoe repair industry by making shoe repair a cost-effective alternative to buying new shoes, that tradition was further threatened by the mid-1990s when synthetic shoes became popular. This included cheap comfort shoes made with polyurethane and vinyl, which are not repairable.
McFarland also adds that the equipment used by shoe repairers hasn’t changed much since the Industrial Revolution except for, say, larger sanding belts and other advances in technology that cut production time in half.
Today the average American buys about seven pairs of shoes a year. Blame it on the constantly changing fashion that drives consumers to turn in old kicks for new trends, or the lower cost of shoes in the United States due in part to cheaper production costs of imported shoes. That lowered cost makes people less willing to take their shoe down to their local cobbler.
“You’re not gonna take a shoe that you bought for 60 dollars and spend 90 dollars to repair,” said Don Ronaldi, the president of the Shoe Service Institute of America.
Furthermore, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that employment of shoe and leather workers will continue to decline by 14 percent through 2018 due to more shoes imported from abroad.
New York City is a cobbler’s kind of town. Whether to the subway, to work or through one of the city’s more than 1,700 parks, playgrounds and recreation facilities.
Still, a cobbler’s life in the Big Apple has only gotten more difficult. Today, Sulaymanov is one of roughly 200 shoe repair shops in New York City. That’s compared to 7,000 in 1945, according to the Shoe Service Institute of America.
Furthermore, Sulaymanov has to deal with the increasing rents. Sulaymanov shells out $3,000 a month on rent, up from the $500 he paid when he first opened. Then there’s the extras: electric, phone, supplies.
From new taps to full sole changes, shoe services at Emilio Shoe Repair cost anywhere from $3 to $45, not including the cost of labor. This is a good deal if a shoe was purchased for $200 or $300 dollars. After taxes, Sulaymanov makes roughly $36,000 a year.
“This business is hard,” Sulaymanov said. “When people come here and you tell them the price of a service they ask why are you are charging so much and I say, ‘Are you kidding me?’”
After a morning of shuffling back and forward between his work station and Landis polishing machine or sweeping the scuff-marked floor topped with rubber scraps, Sulaymanov takes a break. He lights a Capri cigarette, or sits down to a warm cup of green tea. At times during the day, Sulaymanov takes his hands, stained with shoe grit and polish, and wipes them clean with a rag soaked in thinner.
On one recent Saturday, Sulaymanov’s break was interrupted by Gerard Schmidt, a local Fort Greene resident who lives three blocks away. The two banter in a way that only old friends can.
Schmidt has been coming to Emilio Shoe Repair for 15 years. He lives three blocks away and is here to pick up a brown pair of leather ankle boots for his daughter. Apart from enjoying the store’s gritty feel that reminds him of shoe repair shops in his home in France, he is one of the few who appreciates the fact that he can make his beloved leather shoes last. But, Schmidt also comes for the camaraderie.
“Here you build personal relationships,” Schmidt said, “even if it’s just for two minutes.”
Sulaymanov has two sons, David and Zorick. After high school he brought each of them to his shop to see if they wanted to work in shoe repair. He says he didn’t bring them in sooner because he didn’t want to force his kids into the business.
“They don’t need this dirty job,” Sulaymanov said. “My sons have opportunity over here. They can do a lot of things that are better than this.” For Sulaymanov, he didn’t want to see his children face the financial uncertainty he confronts everyday.
David remembers learning how to repair shoes when he was 18 years old. He worked six days a week for two weeks, helping his father fix shoes and run the store.
“Sometimes I would come over with my friends and say to them, ‘Try to knock in one nail and see how easy it is,’” David said. “Banging a nail into a wall that doesn’t move is a lot easier than hammering a nail into a shoe that constantly moves out of your hands.”
After several days it was clear that David’s hands lacked the talent needed to succeed in the business.
“It’s a really tough business,” David said. “As a cobbler you have to be good with your hands.” So, David opted for work as a car wholesaler. His brother, Zorick, works in the oil business.
According to McFarland, cobblers and would-be apprentices who go off to start their own repair shops may be the key to keeping shoe repair alive — if there was even a market for new cobblers.
But Tommy Rhine, owner of Rhine’s Cobbler Shop in downtown Denver, is convinced there is still a market left in shoe repair. He’s one of three shops in the area, and on most days, especially in the winter, is busy.
Driven by his desire to keep the tradition alive, a tradition he fell in love with after taking a shoe repair trade course in high school, two years ago he started the Rhine Cobbler School two years ago. This nine-month program is the only cobbler school in the United States.
So far, only a few students have trickled in and out of the program, which costs $5,000. Classes are taught by Rhine, who also appreciates the extra help. Most drift in for a month or two, then leave after realizing they can’t foot the cost. Rhine says he’s trying to start a scholarship program to make the school more affordable, but can’t seem to get it off the ground. Still, he claims to get calls all the way from Florida, California and Nevada.
Even if there were students willing to learn the craft, there’s the idea of competition which might further lead some cobblers to decline to take on apprentices. “A problem a lot of repairers have is that often a repairer will train someone and that person will open a shoe repair shop down the street and compete with them,” Ronaldi said. “They don’t want to teach their trade to someone just to build competition.”
But in this day and age, competition is the least of a cobbler’s worries.
“He has no patience with me!” a voice chimes from the back room. Mike Kany, a family friend who immigrated from Soviet Russia the same year as Sulaymanov, learned shoe repair from Sulaymanov’s father. He emerges into the work area and picks up a shoe. In the past two or three months, Kany has been coming to Sulaymanov’s shop to help him repair shoes and tend to the business. When he’s not working at a car dealership in Brooklyn, he says this beats being home.
On a recent Saturday afternoon, Kany and Sulaymanov take a break from changing soles and sanding. Sulaymanov lights a cigarette, filling the tiny workshop with the acrid smell of smoke combined with the pungent stench of shoe polish and leather. As they sit on folding chairs set next to the work table, Kany notes that he wouldn’t mind one day leaving his job to run the business.
“I think he’s going to work until he’s 80,” Kany said with a chuckle.
Sulaymanov doesn’t disagree.
“I’ve been in this business for over 40 years. If you love what you’re doing, you’re going to get stuck with it,” responds Sulaymanov. “I could have gone from this place a long time ago, but I’m still here.”
As the day winds down Sulaymanov plops himself down on a shoe fitting stool that sits underneath a wall of shelves stacked with half soles. He reaches down slowly and takes off his blackened rubber shoes, which he puts on each day at work. Then out comes a pair of squeaky-clean grey and white Nikes.
“What?” Sulaymanov says, looking up at my perplexed face. “Everyone has them. They’re comfortable.”
Sulaymanov then slips them on and laces them up. He flips off the lights and heads out the front door.
This well-crafted article was written in 2011. Eddi is still there, although I call hiim Arri. A good man.
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