Cobbler Stays a Step Ahead of the Hip

In what can loosely be called “shoe circles,” Pasquale Fabrizio is a minor deity.

Not only can he take the squeak out of a pair of boots, he can put the squeak back in. He can dye a favorite pair of shoes cream for a wedding day, then return them to a pristine black.

When Dorothy’s ruby slippers from “The Wizard of Oz” needed a touch-up, the Smithsonian Institution sent them to Fabrizio. In an armored car.

Shoe lovers of every age, race and income travel unfamiliar swaths of Los Angeles to see the master cobbler.

It should be a winning business formula.

Yet it is hard to imagine that a more successful craftsman, who has struggled like Fabrizio, has to keep his doors open.

Twice in the last five years, waves of upscale development between Park La Brea and the edge of the Miracle Mile have replaced Pasquale Shoe Repair with the trendier, the hipper and the more lucrative.

A simple cobbler has become an uncanny bellwether of gentrification.

“It’s like we’d have a stay of execution -- things would be going OK -- then we’d have to leave and start all over again,” Fabrizio said.

Where Fabrizio started, on 3rd Street in the Park La Brea Plaza, stand the regal Palazzo apartments, with rents as high as their penthouses.

At Wilshire Boulevard and Detroit Street, in the Miracle Mile, luxury apartments and shops are rising where his second store stood.

With each move, Fabrizio’s business has stumbled.

Now at the shop’s third location, on San Vicente Boulevard near Hauser Boulevard, Fabrizio and his wife, Lina, wonder whether their following will follow them once again.

Pasquale, 45, is artistic, a perfectionist with a soft touch for hard-luck cases. Lina is practical, easygoing, with a head for business and a memory like a Palm Pilot.

He fell for her when he saw her going to work at a bank in Montreal, 21 years ago.

“When I saw her, I knew right away. That was it,” Fabrizio said, slicing his hand sideways through the air.

Lina trusted Pasquale’s dreams enough to abandon a $450-a-month mortgage in Montreal and pack the boys, Marco and Ricardo, and head west with him in 1994.

Fabrizio took over the repair side of a business that his uncle, Pasquale DiFabrizio, had made famous by crafting custom shoes for the likes of Cary Grant, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra.

By 1994, recession had taken a toll on the old-time craft stores of 3rd Street. But then a wave of new residents, many of them fleeing the damage of the 1992 riots, crossed west over La Brea and discovered the abundant 1920s Spanish-style houses in the shop’s neighborhood. The Fairfax-Miracle Mile area became a magnet for home buyers, hip restaurants and trendy boutiques.

“What I think should have been the nail in the coffin turned out to be exactly opposite,” said Stephen Kramer, president of the Miracle Mile Chamber of Commerce.

While Pasquale and Lina set about fixing the low-heeled Naturalizers of seniors who tap-danced at the community center a few doors down, Hollywood brought in some special jobs.

When the costume designer for “The Green Mile” needed the squeak taken out of a pair of boots for one scene, then put back for the next, Fabrizio delivered.

When actor Will Smith complained that his feet ached after hours of boxing in preparation to shoot “Ali,” Fabrizio went to watch Smith box. The actor was not floating like a butterfly, Fabrizio concluded; he was supinating.

“We reduced the amount of support in the boots. That way his feet would still roll out, but he wouldn’t feel it,” Fabrizio explained. Using Muhammad Ali’s original Everlasts as a model, he quickly fashioned eight pairs of custom boots for Smith.

Then came the letter. Mega-developer Alan Casden had bought the Park La Brea Plaza, where his shop was located. He gave Fabrizio 30 days to vacate.

“See, I didn’t tell Lina there was no lease for the business,” Fabrizio said. “I mean, nobody -- nobody -- buys a business that has only a month-to-month lease.”

Panicked, Fabrizio searched the area south of 3rd Street.

“I was a man with a family to feed and I was questioning myself, beating myself up endlessly,” Fabrizio said.

With 10 days left to vacate, he found their second site on Wilshire Boulevard, one block west of La Brea.

Old customers had no idea where the shop had gone. Business withered.

“Then I said: I started with nothing and I’ll end with nothing,” Fabrizio said. “I work hard; I’m fair. I’ll do the best I can. If that’s the way it’s going to be, then God has plans for me.

“You know what? The next week was a little better. And then the next. Not all at once, but in increments.”

At first, customers brought in their well-loved loafers, beat-up brogans, sandals and thongs. Then the Fabrizios started seeing a suspicious amount of toe cleavage. Manolo Blahniks, sexy Zanottis and funky Arlene C’s. Single people’s shoes. The Fabrizios knew what it meant. Courtyards and concierges would be arriving right behind them.

“It’s not that the people at the Wilshire location had more money; it’s that they spent more money on shoes,” Lina said.

The Fabrizios prepared for the worst. They bought a building less than a mile away on San Vicente Boulevard, between a strip mall and a row of apartment buildings east of Fairfax Avenue. Sure enough, a year later, a letter informed them that their lease on the Wilshire store would not be renewed.

Now in the new location’s bright, airy workshop, Fabrizio toils away, a reliable confidante to celebrities and stars, a simple cobbler to others.

“You know, you can tell a lot about people by touching their soles,” he says.

Usually, Fabrizio says, people don’t know what their problem is.

“I spend most of my time talking to people, telling them that what they think they want really isn’t what they want at all,” he says with a shrug.

His services are not cheap, but given the amount of craftsmanship bestowed on even the simplest flip-flops, Fabrizio figures they’re reasonable.

Sole man Cesar Tzic cuts the patterns, then slowly treadles a 1920s Singer sewing machine, laying a line of precise stitches, millimeter by millimeter. Two other men work on uppers, and a fourth creates custom dyes for the leather items brought in for repair: handbags, jackets, belts, dog muzzles, and once, a car with a cat-shredded leather interior.

If repairs do not meet his standards, they are redone. Fabrizio proudly pulls completed shoes from the shelves and shows how, comparing the original stitching and the repair, it is the repair that is more exact.

Fabrizio has given serious thought to cobbling. Every pair of shoes that comes in goes back out into the world with a bit of his heart and values in them. It’s in the polish, embedded in the soles.

“There is a magic to this business, and that’s because it allows you to be human,” he says, holding up a man’s loafer. “See, you still have to touch and feel things, and talk to people. You can’t do it with machines or voicemail.”

For his ardent following (out-of-state devotees FedEx him their shoes) the relationship goes beyond well-repaired footwear. Fabrizio often meets his customers at pivotal moments in their lives: weddings and bar mitzvahs, Academy Award dreams-come-true or a heartbreaking diagnosis that their feet will never be pain-free. They enter his shop filled with hope and vulnerability, begging him, “Pasquale, please.... “

Some have gone so far as to show up at his home after hours, shoes in hand.

For Honnie Juda, the third generation of Juda women to rely on a Fabrizio, the critical occasion was a wedding.

Her groom needed cream-colored shoes to match his suit for the ceremony in Maui. But no one in Los Angeles sells cream-colored shoes in October.

“Everything else was perfect, and I thought, it’s just these ... shoes!” Juda said.

Fabrizio dyed the groom’s favorite black Pradas cream for the wedding day, then restored them to their original black. Juda has followed Fabrizio like an acolyte. “When they moved, at first it was traumatic,” she said. “But now I’ve found my little way of getting there and getting the parking right, and it’s just as easy.”

A few weeks ago, Tracy Lyles traveled from Silver Lake to have Fabrizio add a strap to a pair of cheap slides and transform them into sling-backs. He emerged from the workshop and dangled them before her.

“Don’t those look great? Those are $3 shoes and I swear they look like $10 shoes now!” she said, laughing.

“When he first told me he had moved to San Vicente, I said ‘Oh no. I’m going to be lost forever,’ but this is really nice, and it was easy to find.”

The new location is the least fashionable but most attractive of the three.

Who lives in the neighborhood?

“Families,” Lina and Pasquale say in unison.

“These are people who moved here planning to stay, put down roots, raise their families,” Pasquale says. People like the Fabrizios.

Fabrizio is convinced he’s one step ahead of the tides that wash over Los Angeles neighborhoods, transforming them from homey to hip.

“But I can tell you now where the next place is that it’s going to happen: Pico Boulevard,” he says, waving his hand south.

The Fabrizios have built an adjoining coffee shop that serves authentic Italian pastries. With its wood-beamed ceilings and stained-glass art, Pasquale Shoe Repair and Cafe now is the swankest shop on the block. The Wilshire Vista Neighborhood Assn. is thrilled. City Councilman Martin Ludlow is planning a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Finally, Pasquale Fabrizio is a force for gentrification.