Cobbler On (Or Near) The Roof

Okay, so the last two haven't been paint on brick, so let's try to get back too it.  Somehow I missed this one when I snapped the several signs on its neighbor up the block in Dinkytown.  But the grey sky is still a give away to winter, as I swung back through in February during one of my basketball-related trips back to campus.

In case you can't read it, the sign says, "Campus Cobbler."  And in case you were born sometime in the last century and you don't really know what a cobbler is, it also helpfully says, "shoes."  And in case you worried that they might not carry your Jimmy Choos or Manolo Blahniks (or some other brand featured on a tv show sometime in the last decade), you can barely make out that it also says "men's and women's."

Okay, so I'm going on a bit about the words on the sign because I'm not confident that I'm going to find much research about it, and I need to get this up fairly quickly before heading out to a fancy dinner (Bachelor Farmer, if you're a foodie, which is actually in a building that has been featured on this blog before, so I'll have to check on the state of the signs).  

So it turns out I was sort of wrong about whether I could learn anything.  It seems like the Campus Cobbler is related to the nearby Fast Eddie's Show Repair, which is across the alley (and apparently still there).  It seems the current owner/operator of Fast Eddie's, named Jim, became the manager at Campus Cobbler in 1979, only to move over to Fast Eddie's in 1987 where he's remained.  The original Fast Eddie, took up the shoe repair business in 1936 when hard times forced he and his brother into the big city of Crookston, MN. Eddie's brother went off to the war, but Eddie's flat feet kept him out, leaving him to find a shoe repair shop in Minneapolis in need of help on his way home.  The war, not surprisingly, was good for the repair business, and Fast Eddie's was eventually born.

I've got less on the shoe store itself, except a few old ads in the Minnesota Daily in 1966, 1967, and more 1967.  The Hennepin County Library also has as shot of the street in 1974.

Only Partly Spooky

 I was back on campus twice this week with the return of college basketball season, so let's head back to Dinkytown.  This building has paint-on-brick signs on three sides that are s snapshot of both the past and today.

Let's start with the present.  Annie's Parlour is a burger and malt institution that's been there since I don't know when.  Well, I say institution but I've only been there a few times and the last was at least twelve years ago, but hey, it's still there, so it's got that going for it.  It doesn't seem that to have its own webpage, but it shows up on a variety of user review sites.   This shot from Flickr gives a good perspective of the balcony that overlooks the space where the railroad tracks that may be the source of Dinkytown's name used to be.

 Next up is the partially ghost bit.  Ragstock still exists, but not at this location.  It's a second hand clothing company (started in 1954 to import and export used clothes) that operated at this location from 1979 to 2002 but closed due to declining sales and increasing rent.  I paid fifteen bucks there for a leather trench coat for a Halloween costume in college, but I moved away in 1999 and that clearly was the beginning of the end.  I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to the Dinkytown community.  It's all my fault.  It's the Kitty Kat Klub today.

The last sign, as you can see, is for Art Materials Inc.  I'm running short on time, and it's a pretty generic name, so I'll just leave you with a couple of old adds in the Minnesota Daily from Aug. of 1980 (pdf, pg. 12) and Nov. 1982 (pdf, pg. 13).

Tiny Hardware?

We are in Dinkytown for the first time, with this sign for William Simms Hardware. It's not actually been a hardware store for some time, but I haven't been able to find when it started or stopped functioning in that capacity. I lived not too far away for a couple of years while in college in the late 1990s, so I know the fun ended some time before that. I don't know whether Our Own Hardware was the chain of stores or a franchiser or cooperative, but it was sold out of existence in 1997.

As for origins, Mr. Simms was to be a member of the entertainment committees for the the 1915 National Retail Hardware Convention at the St. Paul Hotel, so it goes back at least to then. Apparently he lived quite close to work (how green of him), near 14th and Hennepin, at least as of 1922. Robert Simms, apparently a descendant of William, owned and operated the store before dying in Wisconsin at the age of 85 in 2003.

The store, on 14th Ave. SE, has been posted to Flickr a few times.

UPDATE:  Apparently I was wrong and it was still an operating hardware store when I lived in the neighborhood.  It closed in 2002.  My excuse is that one does not do many home improvement projects on the crumbling houses of the area that are rented pretty much exclusively to poor college students.