After 20 Years In Newkirk Plaza, Alex’s Shoe Repair Will Permanently Close On Monday, August 31

For 20 years, Alex Belanchuk has taken the shoes that have become the victims of our lives — the athletes’ sneakers that have seen one too many laps around the field, the construction workers’ boots trampled by sun and dust and labor, the children’s hand-me-down dress shoes — and has breathed new life into them in his Newkirk Plaza shop.

Now, two decades after moving himself and his family from the Ukraine to Brooklyn, where the Brighton Beach resident has spent many long days in our neighborhood, surrounded by Singer sewing machines and spools of thread and shoes barely clinging to their past selves, he is shuttering Alex’s Shoe Repair and leaving our community for good. He will be permanently closing his shop on Monday, August 31 to move to Colorado, where his son and other family members live.

“My family is there,” Alex said. “I see no future here.”

Word has spread like wildfire that he is leaving, and Alex seems to have to spend as much time fielding phone calls about his impending departure as he does working in a profession that he’s been in for 40 years, with his first two decades being spent in the Ukraine, where he attended college specifically to become a cobbler.

“My mom said, ‘If you work by hand, you’ll make a living,'” Alex said, just before he picked up the phone and began speaking in Russian, the only parts of the conversation making their way past my language barrier being, “Da, da, da.”

After hanging up, he explained it was a longtime client calling from New Jersey.

“She wanted to know if I’m leaving; everyone asks if I’m leaving,” Alex said, his eyes still focused on a sneaker before him.

“These sneakers, his family can’t afford to buy him new shoes, so I fix them,” Alex said. “I make them look new.”

This idea — the saving and transformation of the items that are so crucial to our day-to-day-lives — is something Alex clearly takes pride in, though that pride is hidden in part by a humbleness born from someone who is both clearly skilled and who genuinely takes interest in bettering the lives of people in our neighborhood.

“I’m crying inside for the people who live around here,” Alex said. “Rent, commercial rents — it’s not possible to afford it. Ask a family how much they make; how can they afford $1,600 for a one-bedroom apartment?”

With that in mind, Alex finds himself tackling shoes that probably should be thrown out — but he knows the family who brought them in, and he knows they can’t afford to do so.

Alex himself knows what it means to be priced out of the area; he left his former Newkirk Plaza shop for a space in the back of a cell phone store, Even Wireless, at 34A Newkirk Plaza (Coffee Z moved into the space where he previously was located).

“I had a nice big store, but I had to leave,” he said. “We share the rent now — I can’t afford the rent by myself. Who can afford $4,000 a month? Twenty years ago, my rent was $800. Now? We share to survive.

“My prices are the best,” he continued. “I could make them go up, but I don’t. I don’t want to rip off people.”

And so, Alex is leaving. He will pack up his machines and his tools and haul them away to a town just outside of Denver, where he said he’ll likely open a shop.

“It will be OK,” he said, gesturing to the space around him. “Somebody else will come in — maybe worse, maybe better. That’s life.”