HEART AND SOLE
After more than 100 years, founding family steps away from Gordon’s Shoes
After his grandfather came through New York’s Ellis Island at 18 years old from Lithuania, shoemaking became the common thread that laced Charles Gordon’s life together.
Gordon’s Shoes opened its doors in 1885 in the Hill District. After more than 100 years in business, the store’s current location at The Waterfront in Homestead was recently sold to Shoe Fly, a Tyrone, Pa.-based company.
While the selling price was not disclosed, Mr. Gordon said all of his existing 15 employees will be retained. Three of his employees, he said, had been with him for over 30 years. The business will operate under the name Shoe Fly.
Mr. Gordon, 72, said that while his grandfather couldn’t read or write, he had a marketable skill — crafting shoes from animal hide — and a philosophy of lending a hand to everyone.
“My grandfather and my family back then had a ledger,” he said. “A leather-bound ledger, that they never would allow anybody to leave the store without shoes whether they had money or not. So, if you didn’t have money, all they asked you to do was to sign your name. And the hope was that [in] better times, you might be able to come in and square up.”
Mr. Gordon said at the end of the year, the ledger was thrown out, and they would start anew. They didn’t track who did and didn’t pay, he said, because it was “just their way of giving back to the community.”
Gordon’s Shoes moved from the Hill District to Bloomfield in 1968. Years later in 2001, the shop moved to The Waterfront.
“I just remember vividly when we were in Bloomfield, some of the old-timers would come in and say, ‘You know, your family was just unbelievable,’” he said. “And they would always tell me that story about the ledger.”
Mr. Gordon holds his own childhood memories in the store closely as well. When he was about 7 or 8, he remembers running down to the basement of the store on creaky wooden stairs.
“I would run down those steps as fast as I could, and there were
cardboard boxes from Buster Brown Shoe Co.,” he said. “And inside those boxes were comic books, and although I was up there to say hello and, at times, to get shoes and visit, my mission was to get that latest comic book. That’s what drove me.”
Once the store moved to Bloomfield, it took on new design elements. Against the wallson the second floor was a log cabin by Harrison Trask of HS Trask shoes, who was known in the industry for his creative marketing methods, Mr. Gordon said.
“You had all the product on these Adirondack tables and chairs … and then we had a gigantic buffalo head comingup the steps from the first floor. I’d say the head itself was probably 6 feet.”
He knew Greg Wagner, chairman of Shoe Fly Shoes and president of LawrencevilleWagner Quality Shoes, and Todd Lewis, president of Shoe Fly Shoes, previous to the sale. Mr. Gordon said they were buying New Balance stores, along with shoe stores in smalltowns that were at risk ofgoing out of business.
“It just seemed to me like it was the perfect fit from finding a strategy to exit and still take care of all my employees — my family — for so many years,” Mr. Gordon said. “They have the same valuesthat I do there.”
WagnerShoes has been in Pittsburgh since 1854, and Buzz Wagner, Greg’s father, is still working the business at 93 years old. Mr. Lewis described Wagner’s as the sistercompany to Shoe Fly.
“We were pretty much competitors [with Gordon’s] because we were very close, a half a mile away,” Mr. Wagner said.
“But we always had a cordial relationship. Independent shoe business is kind of a small world, and everybody knows everybody.”
Mr. Lewis said they plan to expand their inventory. In August, he said, Shoe Fly will be opening its 11th store in Ross Park Mall in Ross. In total, there are 11 Shoe Fly stores and four Appalachian Running Co. stores under the Shoe Fly company. The New Balance stores will now operate as Appalachian Running Co. stores, he said.
“A lot of the reason of being able to acquire a business like this is to really bring together career professionals,” Mr. Lewis said. “People that have spent their lives in the shoe business that understand the customers, understand the industry.
“Our business was really built one customer at a time,” he said. “That perspective is not going to change. We really feel that our calling is to give that one person that enters our store full attention and treat that person with our full focus and service. ... It’s a really good challenge in a business like ours that we need to prove ourselves to customersevery single day.”
Mr. Gordon doesn’t describe his exit as “retirement” per say, but more as a brand new chapter. He said he is looking forward to spending time with his children and grandchild and San Francisco, as well as his 15-month-old puppy. Above all, Mr. Gordon said, he’s going to stay active.
“My next chapter is like a page in the diary every day,” he said. “And it will just keep growing and growing and growing.”