The Westdale Village Shoe Clinic is closed but what a legacy and what a place it was
The sign stands out - for not standing out.
It's still there though the shop is closed. Amid the colours, loopy fonts and neo-Deco flourishes that prevail on the professional shopboards of the village," Antonio's letters are straight up, looking almost handmade. Village-y, without the quotes.
The work that went on inside was the same. The shop, Wesdale Village Shoe Clinic, was just as quaintly different as its sign, just as separated from the flow of time. While contemporary retail practices abounded in all the business around him - cards got tapped, cellphones snake-charmed Wi-Fi out of the air for a product rating, or a keto diet got accommodated at a restaurant - Antonio quietly fixed shoes.
He would do, almost unchanged, what his ancestors did before him. Working with solvents and adhesives, stitching machines and lasts, clamps and hammers, drive shaft-operated buffers and sanders, Antonio Ammendolia would doctor old shoes back to health, make them beautiful again. He would ply his trade. Get customers back on to a good footing.
If you'd ever been in his shop you felt the specialness fold around you as the door shut behind your entrance. The mingled smells of leather, oil, polish and, yes, cigarette smoke. The shelves of shoes and boots and handbags. Old brown oxford brogues with perforated vamps and uppers; a tall boot with the top half drooping like a dog's ear; pumps and mules, flats, slingbacks, high heels; wingtips; loafers; bulchers. All there.
A few weeks ago Antonio had a health setback that affected his vision and he has retired.
Ivan Kredl, a McMaster Arts and Science student, grew up in Westdale and has passed the Westdale Village Shoe Clnic a thousand times, more, since he was a baby.
He emailed to tell me that it was closing but he did so in the most evocative way.
A couple of weeks ago, I was walking down King Street with a couple of my roommates, in Westdale, and came across some ancient suitcases out front of the cobbler's shop. Since it's not every day that you come across suitcases that are presumably older than my parents, I stopped to take a look. We asked if they were throwing them out."
These were Nino's cousins, helping empty out the shop.
The cousins were very sweet and asked us if we wanted to come inside, with masks, to take a look at some of the shoes that people had left behind over the past 50 years. We gladly went inside to take a look at the collection of shoes, the sewing machines that might be as old as my grandparents, and the inches of dust that have collected since the cobbler set up shop so many years ago. We poked around for a little bit, just glad that we could take one last look into the cobbler's shop before it was turned into a vegan dessert room or a wax bar.
As we got to the end of the hall, I felt like I had just been teleported to Dundurn Castle or 60 years into the past. We had just walked into the cobbler's dining room which looked like it had been untouched since 1952 with a credenza flanked by two taxidermied wildfowl spanning across an entire wall, a beautiful dining table with matching chairs and other decor which I haven't seen outside of a staged old house.
I was absolutely blown away."
So, I joined Ivan to meet with Augie Ammendolia, one of Nino's cousins, who toured Ivan through the premises again, this time with me. It's everything Ivan described.
The machinery is beautiful, of a vintage - the colours, the particular green of the Singer sewing machine, which looked to be a hundred years old. The shiny oiled spindles of the buffers, the stacks of heels and polish jars, the wheels and strips of leather.
Augie told us the story.
Antonio and his cousin Nunzio, Augie's brother, came to Canada from San Giorgio Morgeto in Italy in 1950s and '60s. They initially worked at The Shoe Clinic near the Royal Connaught.
Nunzio tells me a story that when he worked on Angelo Mosca's shoes they would not rotate around the shoe shelf stand because they were so long," says Augie.
The brothers at length each left The Shoe Clinic and opened their own stores - Nunzio's was/is The Cobbler's Bench, the largest and oldest full service shoe repair store in Hamilton; it's on Upper James. Antonio's brother, also named Nunzio, opened City Shoe in Jackson Square but has since passed away.
Antonio opened his shoe store in Westdale in 1975. He worked until Aug 25 of this year. He is 83 and now at Villa Italia.
He is happy," says Augie, that his machinery and tools well be sold to a new Canadian, a cobbler from Africa who plans to export the machines to a town there and open up a shoe repair store."
Jeff Mahoney is a Hamilton-based reporter and columnist covering culture and lifestyle stories, commentary and humour for The Spectator. Reach him via email: jmahoney@thespec.com