A visit to the Shoe Museum

I wasn’t even aware that there was a shoe museum in Philadelphia until I caught word of it a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been trying to get over to see it ever since; it’s slightly more complicated than just putting on pants and taking the train to Market East.

It’s on the 6th floor of the Temple School of Podiatry, which is at 8th and Race, and let me take this opportunity to say that although it’s free

YOU NEED AN APPOINTMENT

Which you can get by calling the place’s curator, Barbara Williams, at 215-625-5243 or emailing bwilliams@tuspm.temple.edu, although she says it’s easier if you call. The museum is right in the middle of an in-session medical school with, you know, a guard at the door, so if you don’t let them know you’re coming, you won’t be able to get in.

Once you make your appointment, I wouldn’t schedule anything for at least an hour, because despite it not being a huge collection (two halls, one room), Williams can tell you something interesting about pretty much every one of the 250 pairs of shoes on display. I left after three hours (I asked a lot of questions) feeling as if I’d taken a college class (in a good way!).

For random reasons I ended up taking pictures almost entirely of the one room and not the two halls, but there’s also a ton of world shoes on loan from the Mutter Museum, including the Chinese bound-foot shoes above (they were 3-4 inches long), a bunch of shoes from Hollywood and sports stars, 19th-century wedding shoes, etc.

Don’t expect a visit with, like, echoing hallways and an atmosphere of austere contemplation, because the displays are in fluorescent-lit halls actually used by doctors and students, and they’ll occasionally wander by. However, it’s a totally neat and different experience to get your own personal guided tour. It honestly made me feel bad about how quickly I usually blow through museums, spending maybe a second or two looking at each piece and maybe austerely contemplating the placard for a few seconds more.

But seriously: wear comfortable shoes. Not like these:

This shoe had heels so high that it wouldn’t stand on its own. Nevertheless, the woman who owned it in the 1890s wore the heel down to the nails. Clogs, Docs, mukluks and more after the jump…

Real ocelot shoes said to have been made for a silent film star who died before wearing them.

The insole says “Made expressly for Mrs. Dwight Eisenhower,” from the display of First Lady shoes. Williams does have a pair of President Reagan’s shoes, but she has been keeping them with the Hollywood display until she gets at least another pair of Presidential shoes.

Sole of a pre-Civil War shoe, before the idea of having non-symmetrical left and right shoes became widespread.

Dr. J’s shoe, which, though very large at size 18, still has nothing on Shaq, one of whose size-24 shoes Williams is trying to get her hands on.

Mukluks: The fur’s probably wolf; the ridges on the side of the soles were chewed there by human teeth.

She’s currently trying to figure out who wore these custom-soled Doc Martens, which were donated after being found at a yard sale.

Needlepoint originals.

The smallest bound-foot shoe at the museum, a full-on golden lotus. A 4-inch foot was still good, but it was only a silver lotus.

Heavy wooden child’s clogs with horseshoe-like bits of iron hammered into the sole; something about these was supposed to make a toddler want to learn to walk, which I could maybe see working like one of those inflatable punch-em clowns that always come back upright because they’re so weighted at the bottom. Otherwise, it seemed like it would be hard for a kid to lift his feet off the ground.

Back in the day, instead of carrying around full-on heavy pairs of shoes, door-to-door salesmen used to carry around teeny, perfect little replicas of the shoes they were selling and people could order them. These are real reptile.