Endangered trades in a throwaway society

Back when business was booming, Robert Cangemi, 79, had a couple of employees selling shoes in the front of his shop, while others repaired shoes in the back.

"Franklin Avenue was the Fifth Avenue of Long Island," he recalled. The Garden City Shoe Shop thrived, repairing shoes for customers of nearby department stores - some now defunct.

After 40 years in business, Cangemi was facing a large rent increase and contemplated retiring.

"I would have liked to have given the business possibly to one of my family and then come in two days a week, three or four hours," he said. "But it wasn't paying for itself to do that."

The shop recently closed its doors for good -- just one example of a specialty trade on the decline. Other trades such as custom upholstery and mosaic marble work have also seen their ranks of skilled workers dwindle, in part because of cheaper alternatives in a throwaway society and new technology.

Specialty repair workers -- those who fix typewriters or clocks, for instance -- are also becoming increasingly rare. And as older masters retire, there are few to take their places.

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Lina Gottesman, president of Altus Metal & Marble, based in St. James, said there is still a market for marble trades, but the number of workers with certain special skills has been diminishing.

For instance, she said, few are trained in mosaic marble designs -- "little tiny pieces of marble that would be all lined up and look really pretty in a design."

She said she knows of only one company in the area that can handle that kind of restoration work now. "My company doesn't even do that," she said. "It's a dying art now." 

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Albert Vitiello said that when he started Albert Vitiello Decorators in Bethpage in the 1970s, there were plenty of upholsterers on Long Island.

"It's becoming less and less, because of the clientele, because of the times," he said, citing cheap, mass-produced furniture "that you throw in the garbage" when it wears out.

However, Vitiello said he believes the market for his high-end custom-made furniture will continue to be strong and hopes his workers will take over the business after he retires.

"We're trying to keep it alive," he said. 

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Being one of the few remaining businesses in an industry gives it a competitive advantage, says Mike Catalano, 40, vice president of CLS Custom Upholsterers & Design Center in Bohemia.

His grandfather started the business in Brooklyn in 1945, when "there were upholsterers everywhere." Other shops went out of business as their proprietors retired. "There's nobody going into it," he said of the field. "Their kids get a 'real' job," he quipped. "We're third generation, that's why we're here."

"The way we do things now is almost exactly the same way my grandfather did it," he said.

As for what will happen when he considers retiring, Catalano said he wasn't sure. "I'm 40, my brother's 38 and has a 5-year-old son." For now, at least, he said, "We have a lot of furniture to redo."

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Shoe repair provided Cangemi with a stable income, but "it's become a dying art," he said.

At the peak of the shoe repair industry during the Great Depression, there were as many as 120,000 shoe repairers in the United States, according to the Shoe Service Institute of America, a trade group based in Bel Air, Md. Now, there are some 7,000.

Traditionally, large European immigrant families kept the trade going, but after a couple of generations, "Some had a son or two that went to college to do something else," said Jim McFarland, the group's historian and a third-generation shoe repairer in Lakeland, Fla.

"The big benefit is being born into it because you learn as you are growing up," he said. But as shoe repairers retire, "there's no one to take over. You can't sell it [the business] because there's no one who knows how to do it."

Once, there were a few wholesale companies on Long Island that provided replacement soles, glue and other materials to local shoe repairers, and as many as 20 companies in the New York metro area, Donald Rinaldi, the group's president said. Today, there are only four, and none are on Long Island.

Cangemi's father owned two shoe factories in Manhattan. "I grew up working in the factory during my summer vacations," he said. He also worked in sales.

The experience in both areas prepared him to buy and run the Garden City store. But the expansion of Roosevelt Field Mall and the migration of major retail stores out of the neighborhood drove foot traffic and sales down, he said.

Meanwhile, other forces combined to reduce the demand for shoe repair: Sneakers continued to gain popularity and imported shoes were inexpensive.

These days, the way shoes are put together and the materials used, make them more complicated and time-consuming to fix, Cangemi said.

"You can throw them away instead of repairing them because it costs too much to repair. You can buy a new pair, maybe, for a little more," he said. "This is the throwaway society."

Cangemi said he tried to sell the business, but prospective buyers didn't have experienced tradespeople familiar with his equipment. One asked if he could train the workers.

"I'm not staying here to teach you," he responded. "I decided that it's time. It's just retirement time."

Lisa Cangemi, 46, an art director from Malverne, the youngest of his three daughters, said that she and her sisters grew up working in the shop. "He always used to say to us, 'If you want the business, I'll give it to you.' " But the sisters had other dreams, she said. "It wasn't our thing, it was his thing."

And over the last several years, she said, with rising costs, "By the time it came time for him to retire, it was just a failing industry."