FM Reminisces: Berk's Shoes

It is with a heavy heart and fond memories of 35 years that FM remembers Berk’s Shoes. In my exploits and inquiries around campus, Harvard students have most often remembered Berk’s with an “Oh, yeah, Berk’s!” after I described it as “that place on the corner across from Staples and near ‘Noch’s?”

In fact, it was on my annual pen-and-notebook run to Staples that I noticed Berk’s featured a “closed” sign rather than a shoe display in the window. I glanced across the street, expecting to see tables laden with laundry baskets full of shoes, and instead saw a sign announcing the store’s final closure. I was overcome by nostalgia and melancholy for a store which I had never patronized. Like that old Joni Mitchell song, the one famously appropriated by Counting Crows, “You don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone.” The montage from “You’ve Got Mail” played in my head and Tom Hanks’s goofy, yet inexplicably soothing voice musing over bouquets of pencils and Meg Ryan’s soliloquy about her emotional death when her bookstore closes carried me back to Lowell in a haze of rom-com hypnotism. But the Berk’s Shoe thing continued to weigh on my shopping week crazed psyche.

Berk’s, bohemian-looking from the outside, entered the 21st century in the last few years by adding online sales through an equally bohemian website. Although the online storefront would have made David Malan ’99 cry, scream, and break a computer, there are some fun puns. For example, “Get in or get stepped on,” which feels slightly threatening, but hey, whatever brings in the business.

Support for Berk’s has poured in from the community via Facebook. It is clear that although the absence of laundry baskets on the JFK sidewalk will improve the pedestrian experience, the absence of Berk’s is felt in all of our hearts. No more will I be able to buy $10 rain boots when it’s already raining or run there for 2/$10 flip flops when my shower shoes break for the fifth time. I will have to pay $20 at Urban for the same low quality canvas shoes that Berk’s sold for half the price. Although Berk’s was mainly a logistical inconvenience for me (see the above comment about laundry baskets), it was an active and amiable member of the Harvard community. Berk’s was one of the few places that accepted Crimson Cash. Staples, Starbucks, Urban: None of these places are establishments where we can “crowd source” funds with the convenient ‘Request Money’ button. (Sidenote: Has anyone used this? Can there be one of these for life?) Now, when I find myself in times of wet feet trouble, Berk’s will not be there for me. Berk’s was often the center of the action, the place to be, as it were. As the scene of an armed shoe robbery and witness to the arrest of a “Masturbator,” the store is prominently featured in my personal Bizarre Crimes in the Square saga.

Students have been outraged by Yogurtland’s vanishing act, but have shown little regard for the one establishment that was always there for them, even though ultimately we were not there for it. Well, Berk’s, here it is. Keep it up online, maybe we can get a CS50 freshman in there to help you out with that. But really, congratulations on 35 years. We’ll miss ya.