After hearing a hateful Mercedes Benz radio ad, trashing Italians 
[all with ethnic accents] who are looking to join forces with another 
good "family," this story revived my spirits.
================================================
A DOWNTOWN COBBLER GETS BACK ON HIS INSOLES

Down on your heels? Visit Salvatore Iacono, a Sicilian cobbler in NYC.

New York Times
Lower Manhattan Journal
January 20, 2002    
By Andrew Jacobs
 
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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http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/20/nyregion/20JOUR.html