Gabriel Fontana has been hammering, stitching, and buffing shoes for nearly 75 years. He was 35 and a recent Italian emigrant when he took over his brother-in-law’s Forbes Avenue shoe repair store in the 1970s. Back then, times were good for the trade he’d honed since boyhood.

“It was a very busy time, and I was packed,” Fontana recalls. “At lunch time, people walked on the streets.” Fontana was not the only cobbler flourishing under the pre-internet retail environment in which he got his start in Pittsburgh. He remembers at least nine others plying their trade Downtown in those early days.