Lower Haight History: Haight & Fillmore's Shoe Repair Shop

Lower Haight History: Haight & Fillmore's Shoe Repair ShopPhotos: Courtesy of David Gallagher
Mike Gaworecki
Published on July 27, 2015

When smoke shop Good Fellows recently closed up shop at 473 Haight St., David Gallagher let us know that “many great businesses have passed through” the space.

Gallagher would know better than most: the co-founder of the Western Neighborhoods Project explained that his great-grandfather, George Edward Gallagher, once ran a shoe repair business in the very same storefront.

“My great-grandfather and his older brother both had shops. One was at 22nd and Bartlett in the Mission District; this was the main shop, at Haight and Fillmore,” Gallagher told Hoodline.

“I believe both the 22nd Street and the Haight Street shops were opened in the late spring of 1906, after their shop at 1155 Market St. was burned in the [post-1906 earthquake] fire," Gallagher said. "The [473 Haight] shop was there until about 1933. George and his wife Micaela continued to live on Haight Street well after retirement.”

Here's a photo of the interior of 473 Haight, circa 1920. On the left is Gallagher’s grandfather, Eugene E. Gallagher, Sr.; on the right, his great-grandfather, George E. Gallagher. “One thing my father always likes to point out in this [photo] are the slippers on the bench at right, for people who were having repairs done while they waited,” Gallagher notes.

George Edward Gallagher was the youngest of seven brothers, all born in Randolph, Massachusetts, which David says was something of an American shoemaking center in its day. George and several of his brothers "were all shoe repairers, working in boot factories, leaders in the trade unions." They eventually moved to San Francisco, though David said he doesn’t know exactly why. 

In the era when the Gallagher brothers were mending the neighborhood’s shoes, a cable-car line ran down Haight and all the way out to Golden Gate Park. “It’s definitely been a business street for a long time, probably even more important in the past than it is now,” Gallagher said.

Here’s a shot of the Haight Street cable-car tracks being rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake. It was taken outside the Gallagher Bros. shop just a few months after it opened; the shop is visible at right.

Workers reconstructing tracks on Haight Street on December 6, 1906. (Photo: SFMTA)

Here’s a close-up of the exterior of the shop:


Gallagher also sent along this ad that ran in the Morning Call in 1907. Like the building in the SFMTA image, it also touts “Shoe repairing by machinery."

For more views into the Lower Haight of yesteryear, check out parts one, two, three and four of our photo series.