The windows were smashed. The front door and a brass door leading into the lobby of the office building that sat on top of the store both lay flat on the floor.
Inside, his equipment was buried in what looked like a half foot of ash. Three firemen were spread out on the floor, asleep. They and their brethren had obviously been using Continental Shoe Repair as a relief station.
And as a bathroom. In a corner, just under where Sal’s picture of the Virgin Mary still hung by a nail on the wall near the front window, there was a large plastic bucket filled with liquid and solid excrement. In the other corners were puddles of more urine.
As Sal looked up from the bucket, he saw that his walls had been stripped bare, except for some shoe polish. The cash register was empty, too. Tears in his eyes, he turned and left. When he got home, he told his wife that he had lost everything. Franca Iacono, reminding him that he was 67, told him it was time to retire.
Sal moped around the house for about a week. The fight seemed to be gone from the man who had come here 35 years ago from Sicily and built a business that had provided a decent enough living to buy his own home. He was nothing like the bouncy craftsman with the gleam in his eye whose shop was like an old-style politician’s clubhouse, where he so delighted his customers with promises to perform magic on their leather goods that some of the regulars called him “Sal the Sole Man.”
He remembers his stomach tightening as he had visions again and again of the buildings crashing around him, and people rushing past his store “like they were running from the bulls.” He remembers being scared, afraid to go back, and knowing that he had nothing to go back to. He felt, he says, “like a beaten dog.”
But Sal didn’t stay beaten long, and what he’s done and how he’s been helped since is an encouraging, though hardly finished, story of how the country has been fighting back on the home front in the Sept. 12 era.
By the second weekend after the attacks, Sal decided that “I hated the feeling of being a quitter.” And by Oct. 15, having laid out about $19,000 from his savings for repairs, new doors, a new ceiling and floor and new locks, he was back in business.
But just barely. The streets around him were still blocked to anything but emergency or recovery vehicles, and the few pedestrians around who had returned to work had to show identification before getting through the barricades. Continental Shoe Repair was one of about 1,000 retailers that were stuck in that frozen zone. They now were missing a huge part of their customer base–approximately 100,000 people who had worked in the buildings that had been destroyed or damaged so badly that they could not reopen without repairs.
Sal took in $45 that first Monday, about a tenth of what he would have rung up on an average day before September 11. But he was back at 7 on Tuesday.
Within a month Sal was down in the dumps again, not knowing how he could survive. He was dipping deeper into his almost-depleted savings to pay rent, the electric bill and the salary of his one employee, who was now forced to work part time.
On a Saturday in November he made his way to a center set up by various charities trying to aid the September 11 victims. He’d heard he might be able to get some kind of loan. When his turn came, he approached a woman sitting at a bridge table, dropped a folder of assorted papers in front of her and said, “Please help me.”
Sal didn’t know it then, but he had just caught his first break.
The woman sitting at the table was Hollis Bart, then 46, who is a partner with the law firm of Ross & Hardies. Bart, along with hundreds of other lawyers who typically work for large corporate clients, had volunteered to help the victims of September 11. Along with Lynn Gerdes, a young associate in the firm’s Chicago office, Bart became, in Iacono’s words, “my salvation.”
In another context, Bart might be the kind of lawyer you hate. She’s blunt, tough and relentless to the point of manic. She suffers fools, or even people who just don’t agree with her, terribly. But when it came to her September 11 work, all of that translated into her firm’s helping 14 clients free of charge at a cost of about $153,000 in terms of the firm’s usual billable hours, including one pro bono client whom Bart recruited by striking up a conversation in an elevator.
The first day, Bart got Sal $1,500 on the spot just for making a loan application. She then got the insurance company not only to pay for almost all of Sal’s repairs (even though for some he laid out cash and had no receipts), but also to pay out $11,000 for business interruption, including $5,400 for the period even after Sal had reopened. After pushing the first claims person out of the way by going over his head, Bart argued successfully that Sal’s business was “interrupted” for two weeks when the barricades were still up. She and Gerdes also completed a business plan and application that got Sal a low-interest $20,000 loan from the Small Business Administration.
On top of that, Bart and Gerdes handled all the paperwork and meetings that resulted in Sal’s getting a $9,600 cash grant from a program set up specifically to help small businesses recover from the attacks.
The program that made that grant was funded in large part by the September 11 Fund. That’s the organization that raised much of its money with a telethon organized by George Clooney and other Hollywood stars. It’s also the group that was criticized early on for not dispensing everything immediately. In fact, like Sal and his pro bono lawyers, the people running the fund are among the heroes of this Sept. 12 story. They have smartly allocated the $506 million they raised to a variety of programs–mental-health counseling, job retraining and grants to 1,000 small organizations and businesses like Sal’s–rather than spend the whole thing on checks to the families of those who died.
For Sal, that cash grant and the other fruits of Bart’s lawyering are “the reason I am still here,” he said one recent morning, while advising a woman on how to dye her shoes. And, except for the morning of the anniversary of the attacks, when he was, he says, “depressed and scared again,” he does seem to have much of the gleam back in his eye as he does the work he loves. It’s an outlook that seems to reflect much of downtown, where things also seem to be starting to bounce back.
This is not to say that all is well with Sal, or among the thousands of other small businesses near Ground Zero. Many, including a competitor of Sal’s a few blocks away, have been forced to close. And Sal’s sales are still down about 25 percent since the attacks, which is roughly consistent with the percentage of workers who still haven’t returned to his neighborhood.
Nor has the recovery effort been flawless. Many small businesses that didn’t have the help he got from Bart and Gerdes fell through the cracks when it came to getting aid from the various charities. Most important, a federally subsidized state program with hundreds of millions of dollars left unspent had been largely ineffective when it came to businesses like Sal’s. The program–run by the Empire State Development Corporation, which is controlled by New York Gov. George Pataki–has provided significant subsidies to many residents and larger businesses that have committed to remain in lower Manhattan. But its rules have been written in a way that has kept Sal and small businesses like his from being eligible for more than a few thousand dollars each. So far, the corporation’s top officials have resisted Bart’s repeated attempts–and, knowing Bart, they have been repeated–to get them to change the guidelines in a way that would provide real help to more of these small retailers. (A corporation executive in charge of the program declined to comment.)
Sal is still not out of the woods. With all of his fixed costs, plus payments he has to start making on that SBA loan, the difference between his business’s running at 75 percent and 100 percent is pretty much the difference between having any money to take home or not. So he’s hoping for a pickup in volume this fall, while Bart’s hoping she breaks through to that recalcitrant state agency and gets it to do the right thing. But for now, the Sole Man is still standing.
