By Cheryl Ross
The day before, David Mengarelli came in and plopped a pair of shoes on the counter. “You used to be under the el didn’t ya?” Mengarelli asked.
“Dad started it in 1921. See behind you, see the pictures?” Beaming, Geroulis pointed to a collection of mounted photographs on the wall. “See, there’s a picture of my dad here in 1921 underneath the el. That’s my dad in ’71. Here I am when I was a little guy,” he said, pointing to a photo of a small boy on a bicycle under the Morse Avenue tracks.
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Back in the repair room, Geroulis binds a sole to a shoe using an automatic pounder that exerts 500 pounds of pressure. He doesn’t wear gloves. “I like to feel the work,” he says.
Geroulis says people mail him their shoes from as far away as Florida and California. “It really makes you feel good that you have these nice customers who don’t forget,” he says. “They go to another city or state and they can’t find a person who really takes pride in their work.”
In 1980 the shop was still a one-room storefront under the el. “We had so many shoes in that shop,” Geroulis recalls. “We put them in bags, on shelves, we made more shelves. We could barely move.” So that year he bought and moved into a two-story brick building up the block, a former movie theater-turned-synagogue that Geroulis calls Cobblers Mall. (He has 7,000 square feet of space up for lease.) “I have a lot of friends. We brought stuff from the little shop underneath the el. We had a dolly and we rolled it over here. Right down Morse Avenue.” The new place is full of fond memories. Geroulis went to movies there as a kid; after an Orthodox congregation bought the building and turned it into a house of worship, he turned the lights on for them on the Sabbath.
