The Rise of the Disposable Shoe.

There was a time when you couldn’t walk more than eight blocks in any borough of New York City and not pass a shoe repair place. Like the Army and Navy stores that used to populate Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn, they are dying out, steadily replaced by those most dispensable of retailers, the 99 cent store or the occasional nail salon. There are fewer and fewer of them around because people are fixing shoes less and less.

I miss them more and more these days.

I always loved having a place to get a motorcycle jacket re-conditioned or repaired by someone who actually cared and took a specialist’s pride in what they did for a living. I like the way those places smell as much today as I did when I was a kid. It’s probably because I grew up across the street from an old cobbler from Austria who let me play with his guard dog, a bear-sized German Shepherd. I feel the shoe shop is a last connection in our city to the world of the 1930s and 40s when men wore hats and every woman’s bra was a traffic halting inspiration. The shoe repair shop is a last tie to a place and time where, as Raymond Chandler once observed… New Yorkers talked the way they used to talk.

Which is to say, there was a time when just about every man woman and child in this city had class, authenticity and grace regardless of their station in life and despite all the racism and poverty they faced. A newspaper boy in 1935 Harlem looks better dressed in his work tweeds, turtle neck sweater, hobnail boots and driver’s cap than anybody I saw on the subway this morning. Even bums dressed smart decades ago, -despite themselves, because what they wore wasn’t designed to be thrown away the next year, but to last.

The shoe repair shop is still the place where you will line up behind a bus driver, a doctor, a teacher, a brick layer and so on. I haven’t ever found a computer in a shoe repair shop and the cast iron lathes and anvils have probably been in a family’s business for a few generations. A cell phone ring seems horribly out of place and an almost rude incongruity that disrespects the quiet utilitarian dignity of the surroundings.

The extinction of the shoe repair shop is a sign of a decades-long corrosive shift in how Americans think about the things they use. I own several different kinds of Rockports, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to replace their soles. If I find a model of shoe I like, I basically try to strike a deal for two pairs because when I wear them out they’ll likely be discontinued and I haven’t met a cobbler who can fix or patch an injection-molded rubber sole. Ask them if they can patch Neoprene and they’ll they look at you like you’re crazy.

The fusion of the sneaker and the shoe is responsible for this.

The sneaker was the first intentionally disposable shoe in human civilization. Prior to the sneaker, footwear was worn, repaired and worn until the upper, the last or the welt broke down and could no longer hold a sole, in effect until the entire shoe broke down. The sneaker, marketed overwhelmingly to the parents of children, for their children in the 20th century, was made to wear down and be discarded. If you didn’t mind inviting serious ridicule, back in the 70s, you could even have the local shoe repairman retread your sneakers with material from old tires. I don’t personally know one human being who ever did this.

Construction boots like the classic Georgia 5300 series black boot, Carolina’s MC Boot, and at one time the entire Frye boot line, were all made to be “worn in” and repeatedly reconstructed. It was the Timberland boot [1/27/09 SEE PETE LANKFORD'S REPLY IN COMMENTS BELOW: He makes valid counterpoints about Timberland's intentions in regard to their product design] that signaled the death of the repairable work boot in the late 1970s. Built strong and virtually waterproof, the Timberland construction boot forsook a repairable product for sneaker-like comfort. That comfort came with design limits: a sole that was cast, rather than sewn and therefore a sole that wore out beyond practical use. While Timberland was responding to obvious commercial demands to manufacture a construction boot that would be more comfortable than its competitors’ products, these boots may have set a damaging precedent for the design of the shoe unrelated to comfort. Timberland willingly or unwittingly introduced the concept of "planned obsolescence" to that most functional and practical of shoes, the work boot. The shoe industry had long known it was more profitable to make a shoe that can’t be fixed, than one that can. Shoe makers after all, have to sell shoes. The mandate for comfort was the excuse, and a flimsy one at that, because soft-soled shoes and pliable welts and shanks don’t have to be disposable if the shoe is made of the appropriate materials or designed with eventual repair in mind.
With all the talk of sustainability and waste reduction, doesn’t it make sense to consider the amount of waste tonnage generated by Nikes and Reeboks? How long does it take an old shoe to break down into its constituent elements? It all depends on how much plastic there is inside.

Perhaps a return to responsible design and manufacture in our footwear as well as in our cars and food packaging is a step in the right direction.

Regardless, I doubt it will come in time for my local shoe repairman on 207th Street and Broadway.

-SJ