services
Brooks Shoe Service in the loop is a world unto itself and it's hard to believe you won't need it now or sometime soon.
I have a friend who works nearby who had the droopiest shoe laces you can imagine so I suggested Brooks which has so many different sizes that they have an old computer generated
chart posted on the wall (see below) that demystifies shoestring length by, if you can believe it, number of eyelets! I hadn't been to Brooks for a while but my friend found Mike Morelli the owner extremely dedicated. He insisted on measuring the laces just to be sure they were right.
Brooks has been in business for over 50 years and repairs, shoes, handbags, luggage (even metal!). While I was there a number of fashionable looking women came in with challenges it might be impossible to remedy elsewhere. One needed her elegant Chanel black and beige heels lowered a bit and another was dropping off a vintage alligator handbag for a new handle.
Classic Birkenstock shoes can be resoled here and a new footbed can also be provided so that one walks out with virtually new shoes. Mike even told a customer about a place that will custom make Birkenstocks.
On the premises is a computerized machine that will prescribe a particular kind of orthotic based on a kind of blueprint of your foot and the pressure it exerts on the machine's platform.
The range of products for your shoes is truly amazing. There are all kinds of shoe trees to keep your shoes shapely and bootshapers too; even hooks with wooden handles to help pull on your cowboy boots. There are creamy polishes in an array of colors, including, I'm guessing, hard to find silver and red. There is salt stain remover, shoe stretch liquid and shoe stretch spray which is useful for both shoes and leather gloves. Of course there's a range of shoehorns too.
I noted another hard to find item, men's stretch rubber overshoes for those rainy snowy days on closeout for $8.99.
Returning to laces: there are dressy and casual ones and others for boots
and athletic shoes in all the colors necessary. The longest length I could find was 72 inches.
I asked Mike about his weirdest job which turned out to be repairing a patched and painted room divider in a classical style. It lay unclaimed in the store for a number of years and finally a woman showed up who cleared up the mystery. It had been a favorite of her now divorced husband and she apparently was letting Mike keep it for her as a kind of "ransom" for something she wanted herself. She still comes in and she and Mike chuckle about the experience.
Brooks Shoe Service is in the Pittsfield Building at 55 E. Washington, Suite 335. (Check out the wonderful, elaborate golden elevators in the lobby.) Hours are Monday-Friday 8-5:30 and Saturday 10-3. They are closed on Saturdays in the summer. 312.372.2504.