DOWNTOWN — After 47 years, Marty Altman’s Downtown shoe emporium — the beloved little shop on Monroe Street where men of any ilk, regardless of their foot size, came to find the perfect shoe with the perfect fit, not to mention the best shoeshine in Chicago — got the boot.
In August, Kimpton Hotels announced its plans to turn the art deco high-rise into a boutique hotel, and those plans did not include a nook for Altman’s Shoes, an independent shop that outlived its contemporaries.
That's about when the lifelong shoe salesman who built the business walked away — leaving the store’s last days in the capable hands of his daughter Jackie Delotte, whom he proudly taught everything he knew.
“Dad was leaving the store to me, but [Kimpton] decided not to take part in our marvelous business and our marvelous history and huge customer base,” Delotte said. “Can you tell I’m not happy about it?”
Altman’s Shoes — the full-service shoe shop that opened on Monroe Street in 1967, the product of a family business that dates to 1932 — was best known for its friendly salesmen who put on elaborate “shoe shows."
Altman made a point to carry shoes as tiny as size 5 and mammoth as size 20, with widths ranging from super skinny AAAA to 6E — and kept 23 basement storage units packed with an inventory that topped 26,000 pairs.
“I think people who came into the store were amazed at the shoes we had and the type of service we gave that you don’t get at a big box store. We measure customers’ feet. They don’t do that anymore,” Altman said.
“We had people from all over the United States, sports figures and lawyers, people from the neighborhoods, people who were affluent and people who were not, come to the store, and we treated them all like friends. We would go the extra 10,000 miles for a customer, and that’s what our business was all about.”
Before his namesake shoe shop’s fate was sealed, Altman absolutely refused to name any of his famous customers.
“They are friends,” he told the Tribune in 2005. “I don’t throw around my friend’s names.”
But now that the store is in its final months, there’s no harm in spilling a few secrets.
Over the years, Chicago royalty Bill and Michael Daley, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Illinois Speaker of the House Michael Madigan have had their feet measured at Altman's Shoes.
Talking Heads front man David Byrne, comedian Sinbad, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, former Cubs slugger Andre Dawson, Bears Hall of Famer Richard Dent, Bulls great Scottie Pippen and Academy Award winner Tommy Lee Jones get counted among Altman’s catalog of more than 14,000 customers.
Salesmen at Altman’s Shoes even found a pair for former Bulls player turned broadcaster Bill Wennington, whose size 21 AAAAA feet were the NBA’s biggest in 1994.
And there's that time former Bull Charles Oakley came in to buy shoes and gave salesman Ben Sosani the business about a certain store policy. Altman’s longest employee, Carlos Nieves, saw the whole thing.
“Oakley said, ‘I know my size,' and gave Ben a bit of a hard time,” Nieves said. “Then Ben said, ‘Mr. Oakley my boss requires that we professionally measure every customer.’ And Oakley said, ‘Well, if that’s the case, go ahead measure my feet.’ We all got a laugh.”
Altman, who considered all the shoes in storage part of his personal collection and all his customers his pals, says he’ll miss everything about his store.
“I’ll miss all of it. However, I say to myself I’m satisfied because throughout my life I don’t have any qualms about what I did. I did things how I wanted, and hopefully that was the right way. I’m 82 years old. I had a very long run, which I was very proud of, and it’s something that was very special in my heart,” Altman said.
“It’s unfortunate that it is the way it is, because the younger generation never had a taste of how a family operation runs. It’s an unfortunate situation that a life’s work has come to this. I was brought up in this business."
When Marty Altman’s father died at age 48, the family shoe store at Madison and Cicero that bore his name, Jack Altman’s Shoes, proudly lived on in with his family.
Jack Altman’s widow, Betty Altman, ran the store.
And her young son, Marty, just 14 years old, worked there every day after school and on the weekends.
“I took care of the stock room, keep everything straight and put away,” Altman said. “A couple years later, my aunt who worked at the store told me to work the floor.”
He absolutely loved it … and would never work a job that wasn't shoe-related in his life.
Working with family, Altman learned life lessons that helped him keep his independent shoe shop afloat long after his contemporaries sold out to conglomerates or closed.
It’s where Altman fell in love with shoes and even started designing his own — picking patterns, colors, exotic leathers, the curve of the toe on men’s loafers and just the right height on women’s pumps — that shoe manufactures would specially make for the store.
“I had a knack for it. It’s an individual taste, but I knew my customers, kept in close contact with them, knew what they wanted and ran a hands-on type of operation rather than what you find at a shoe conglomerate that buys for the masses,” Altman said.
And thanks in part to a long-gone shoe store curiosity, time spent in his father’s shoe shop ingrained in Altman another professional obsession — the importance of the perfect fit.
Jack Altman’s Shoes, which opened at Madison and Cicero in 1932, had an X-ray machine in the store that was used to make sure kids shoes had just the right amount of toe room to allow for growing boys and girls.
“We’d put a kid’s food in the X-ray machine, and you could see the outline of the foot itself inside the shoe. It looked just like what you would see at a doctor’s office, only you could look through a scope and use a pointer to show how much room was between the big toe and the end of the shoe,” Altman said. “Of course, they discontinued that machine because X-rays machines probably weren't good for a kid’s feet.”
In the '60s, Altman’s father’s shoe store closed, and his uncle and brother opened women’s shoe shops in the Loop. Young Marty ventured out on his own, too, and opened Altman’s Shoes at 118 W. Monroe in a sliver of a store the shape of a matchbook that was too small to properly display an acceptable number of ladies' footwear.
“We started off with strictly men’s shoes and boots, and we stayed the course,” Altman said.
“I used to spend my whole day at the store. This was my business to grow, and that’s what I did. I was down here at 6 a.m. — an hour early — to put the store in order. I was a stickler for keeping the place neat and clean. I’d vacuum the store three times a day because that’s what I wanted the place to be for every person who walked in the door.”
And that’s the attention to detail that he instilled in the collection of workers he trained to be expert shoe salesmen — guys like Carlos Nieves, the shop’s elder statesman who has worked there for 25 years, and most of all his daughter, Jackie.
“I’ve had the best employees. They were loyal to me all this time, and I like to think I was loyal to them, too,” Altman said. “I can’t put the hours in any more, so I left it up to my daughter, Jackie. She’s a hell of a gal. I rely on her for everything.”
In the final days at Altman’s Shoes, Delotte's father isn't around, but she sees him everywhere, and not just in the 47 years of family photos he has tacked to the back office wall.
“This wasn’t just a business for my father. I got to see his joy collecting shoes, beautiful shoes. The storage spaces were his lifelong collection of beautiful things that he loves,” she said. “This business was absolute joy for him. This place is Marty. These shoes are Marty.”
And Altman’s “collection” is packed with shoes made of the finest leather, exotic skins — sea bass, lizard, elephant, anteater and stingray. You'll find men's footwear handcrafted in America before most shoe factories moved overseas, and even a few custom-made shoes designed by Altman himself that you probably can’t find anywhere else.
There’s such an impressive collection in those basement “vaults” that it’s what attracted film companies and playhouses in search of vintage kicks to use in their productions and became “an interesting sideline business,” for the store, Delotte said.
When the business grew, Altman expanded next door, which still gets packed by his loyal clientele at lunchtime just about every workday.
Last week, guys lined up to get their fancy shoes shined by Larry Winn, a 15-year Altman’s Shoes employee whom the boss calls the “absolute best shoe care professional in the city.”
“Marty is an institution, knows shoes backwards and forwards,” Winn said after giving a fresh polish to the camel-colored wingtips of MindSpring Partners Managing Director Zachary Schnell. “He’s just a good guy who was very stern early on, but mellowed out over the years.”
With a crowd of customers swirling around him, manager Ben Sosani, whom Altman calls “my protégé,” put on a proper “shoe show” for attorney Jeff Ganz, just like the boss taught him.
After measuring Ganz's foot, Sosani returned from the stock room with a stack of boxes and neatly spread a smorgasbord of fancy black and burgundy footwear at the attorney’s feet, explaining the styles and the sale prices of each one before tightly lacing up the pair that Ganz was sold on.
“I learned everything from Marty. All of this. Measuring. Fitting people up. Giving them a good shoe show,” Sosani said. “He shared his knowledge, his kindness. He was the best boss I ever had.”
After Sosani rings up his last sale at Altman’s Shoes on New Year’s Eve, he hopes to take all he’s learned and follow in his boss’ giant footsteps into the uncertain future.
“God willing, I plan to open my own shoe store somewhere in the Loop close to the Financial District,” he said, admitting that he doesn’t have a location, but he’s already picked a name, a hat tip to Ol’ Marty.
“I’ll go from Altman’s to Benman’s.”
When I told Altman about Sosani’s plan, he smiled with pride.
“I like the sound of that,” he said. “Got a good ring to it.”
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