Very Valentine

I lift the key ring off the hook in the alcove by the door. I begin at the front, unlocking the folding metal gates that secure the windows. I roll them off to the side and throw a large latch around them to hold them in place. About twenty years ago, Grandpop installed the gates because the insurance company told him they would raise his rates if he didn’t. Grandpop argued that the building had been safe since his father bought it in 1903, and why should he change? The insurance adjuster said, “Mr. Angelini, your building hasn’t changed since 1903, but people have. You need the gates.”

When my great-grandfather arrived here, he built wooden storage closets all the way around the room. The wood grain is a mix of anything he could find-planks of oak, ends of mahogany, and strips of tiger-eye maple. The patchwork colors and texture of the wood are a reminder that my grandfather built the shop out of remnants from the Passavoy Lumberyard, which used to operate on the corner of Christopher Street. The closets reach to the ceiling. When we were kids, we used to play hide-and-seek inside them.

We store our tools, fabric, leather, and supplies in the closets. The organization of the goods has not changed since the shop opened. Great-grandpop built within the cupboards slanting shelves where we store the carved wooden models of various sizes of feet, called la forma. We build the structure of the shoe around these lasts, which were brought from Italy when my great-grandfather emigrated.

Another closet has a series of wooden dowels that hang horizontally from ceiling to floor. We use a stepladder to reach the wide bolt of sheer, gray-blue pattern paper at the top. Beneath it is a thick bolt of plain muslin, followed by a sumptuous selection of fabrics that alter as the seasons change. There’s double-sided white satin jacquard stitched in harlequin checks; embroidered cream silk patterned with loose flower petals in relief; eggshell velvet that shows a pale gold sheen in a certain light; sheer beige organza as stiff as fondant icing; and milky cotton linen textured with nubs of thread that give it the look of raw dotted swiss. Finally, at the very bottom of the closet, a dowel holds skeins of satin ribbon on small wheels in every shade from the palest pink to the deepest purple.

I remember when my sisters and I would hit Gram up for swatches to make dolls’ clothes. Our Barbies wore some first-class hand-cut Italian goods. And their accessories? With Gram’s supply of jet beads, ball fringe, and marabou feathers, our dolls were swathed in haute couture.

The leather, stacked in sheets, is stored in the largest of the closets. We keep squares of clean fla

We keep by the entrance a small table and straight-backed chair that function as a desk. The phone, an old black model with a rotary dial, sits next to a red-leather-bound appointment book. Over the desk is a bulletin board covered in pictures of the grandkids, and a collage of our customers wearing our shoes in their full wedding regalia. The classic bridal photo comes in two varieties. It’s either a full shot of the bride lifting her hem to show her shoes, or she is barefoot and carrying them in her hands at the day’s end.

A small wooden statue of Saint Crispin, the patron saint of shoemakers, anchors the invoices on the desk. The statue was blessed by Gram’s priest in 1952. Shortly thereafter, the church renounced Crispin’s sainthood, and the statue was demoted from the breakfront upstairs to a paperweight in the shop.

Besides a stackable washer and dryer, there are three large machines in the back of the shop. The roller is a long apparatus with large, sleek, metal cylinders that stretch and smooth the leather. The buffer is about the size of a washing machine and features large hemp brushes, which polish the leather, breaking down the grain to give it a sheen. La Cucitrice is an industrial sewing machine used to stitch the soles and seams.

There’s an old ironing board with a blue paisley cover, and it has more than its share of coffee-colored burns, lots of them my doing. The iron itself is small and heavy, a triangle wedge with the metal handle covered in rattan. It, too, came from Italy with my great-grandfather. The iron takes a good ten minutes to heat up, but we wouldn’t think of buying a new one. My great-grandfather rewired it for electricity when he was a young man. Prior to that, they simply put the iron in the fireplace on an open grid to heat it.

Pressing is the first job an apprentice must learn. You’d be surprised by how long it took me to press fabric without having the edges curl. I thought I knew how to iron, but like every skill involved in making shoes, the stuff you thought you knew has to be relearned and refined. Everything we do is about pulling the construction elements together so that each shoe is perfectly molded to the foot of the individual customer. There can be no rough edges, wrinkles, bunching, or gathering. This is the luxury aspect of wearing a custom-made shoe. No one else could wear yours.

I look at my to-do list for the day. I have to sew beading on a pair of sateen pumps for a fall wedding; Gram has finished the shoe proper, now it’s mine to festoon. I go to the powder room to wash my hands.

My grandfather started a tradition of wallpapering this room with headlines that made him laugh from the New York daily newspapers. His favorite? From 1958: BABY BORN WITH FULL SET OF TEETH. I taped up TYING THE NUT when a fickle movie star married for the third time two summers ago. Gram added CROOK ASTOR when philanthropist Brooke Astor’s son was indicted for taking money from her estate prior to her death.

I go to the worktable to organize my day. I savor rainy days, and I especially love to work when there’s a storm. The rhythm of the drone of the rain as it hits the shop windows is a natural accompaniment to delicate handwork.

“Jesus, it’s a monsoon-a-roonie out there,” June Lawton bellows from the entry. She shakes out her black umbrella and props it open by the door. Then she unbuttons her khaki trench coat and hangs it on a hook over the radiator in the hall. “Too bad it’s not raining men, or we’d be in the chips, sister.”

June, Gram’s oldest and dearest friend, is now in her early seventies. She’s an Irish beauty, with sky blue eyes and a swan neck, which she accentuates with plunging V-shaped necklines, elaborate ropes of beads, and long, loopy chains. June is the original West Village bohemian, and proud of it. Sometimes on a summer afternoon she joins me on the roof when I water the tomatoes. She doesn’t come up just for the sun; from time to time she likes to smoke pot on her coffee breaks. June would hold up the hand-rolled cigarette and say, “Occupational hazard,” referring to her days when she sang with a small jazz combo called Whiskey Jam. Gram used to go and catch her shows at Village clubs in the ’50s and ’60s.

June has the fiery ginger hair of her youth and the smooth skin of someone half her age. I once asked June her beauty secret (it’s not the pot) and she told me that, since she was eighteen years old, she would lather her face and neck with soap and water and then gently buff her skin with a wet pumice stone. Then she’d rinse and apply a thin layer of Crisco vegetable shortening. So much for expensive face creams!

Greenwich Village is filled with women like June who moved to the city when they were young to work in the arts, had some success, and squeezed out a living. Now retired, living in rent stabilized apartments that provide a low overhead, they’re looking for something interesting to fill their time. June loves to work with her hands and she has great taste, so Gram convinced her to come and work in the shoe shop. My grandfather trained June fifteen years ago, and in that time, she’s become an excellent pattern cutter.