ALAN writes:
It was in 1958 when I first heard about the shoe repair shop on Meramec Street, a street that I crossed every weekday. My second-grade classmates were talking about something they called “potchees”. I couldn’t figure out what they meant. At age eight, it was slow to dawn on me that they were talking about “Potje’s Shoe Repair Shop”. By the time we talked about it, the shop had been there for 25 years. It was in the Dutchtown neighborhood of south St. Louis. It was across the street from St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church and rectory (TTH, Aug. 9, 2019), two doors down from Behrmann’s Tavern (TTH, Sept. 3, 2019), two blocks from the building that had been Maryville College (TTH, June 13, 2023), and one block from the red-brick school building where we attended classes from 1958-’62.
The neighborhood was largely German, clean, and orderly. It was a neighborhood of many families, schools, and churches.
In our grade school years, we walked past Nick Potje’s shop nearly every day. Neighborhood families depended on Nick year after year. I can remember riding past his shop with my mother on that rainy Friday in 1963 when President Kennedy was killed, and walking into his shop many times in the 1960s-’80s.
In the early 1900s, before Nick opened his shop there, that storefront was occupied by a shop dealing in clocks, watches, and jewelry. Their concern for precision and accuracy was also important to men like Nick. I walked past his shop hundreds of times and always glanced at the clock on the wall just inside the large window. It always had the right time.
Nicholas Potje opened his shop on Meramec Street in 1933. His family name had had 16 letters in it until his father shortened it to five. In those years, there were hundreds of shoe shops in St. Louis. One day in 1937, Nick was working in his shop when a drunk driver drove into the window. He was not hurt. Aside from that, Nick and his shop were good for the neighborhood, and the neighborhood was good for him and his family. The shop was in the front portion of a red-brick house where Nick lived. It was common for shop-owners on Meramec Street to live above or in back of their shops.
Also in that block were a Catholic Supply store, a barbershop, a bicycle shop, and a post office. Louis Pappas had a shoe repair shop in the next block. It was quite ordinary to see Franciscan priests in their brown robes and Catholic nuns in their black habits walking to and from the church and school buildings. The school’s picnic day parades passed right in front of Nick’s shop.
During the World War II years, Nick was kept so busy that he kept his shop open from 7 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. His son attended St. Anthony of Padua grade school, a block away, the same school I would attend in the 1950s. By that time, Nick and his son worked together in their shop.
In 1951, Nick received a phone call at 2:30 a.m., informing him that he had won a new home in St. Louis County. His family were delighted. But he “said today he would continue to live above his shop” on Meramec Street. He said, “We like this neighborhood. We’re close to work, to school, and especially to church (St. Anthony of Padua Church). It was good enough for us before we won the dream house, and it’s still good enough for us.” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 27, 1951, p. 3)
Nick liked the neighborhood, and so did many other families who chose to stay there for decades, even when suicidal public policies like “diversity” had begun to change the neighborhood for the worse.
Through the 1970s, Nick spoke with many of his customers in German. The most notable feature in his shop was a large, vintage model metal cash register that was nearly a century old and so heavy it required two men to lift it.
In 1990, my father walked past the shop and took a picture of an Easter display extending across the two windows.
Old Nick was still working in his shop three days a week in 1994, 61 years after he opened it. He died in 2002 at age 97. Not long after that, I stood at his gravesite, thinking about the pride he took in his craft and his loyalty to his customers. For some years afterward, the house on Meramec Street remained in fairly good condition, a silent reminder of the man and the shop that had been a bedrock part of that neighborhood. Nick and his shop were gone, but the memories were still there.
And now even that has ended. The storefront and the red brick house were destroyed by a fire in March. And so another part of Dutchtown, my boyhood neighborhood, is now gone.
