In 1997, Dominique Bergeron walked into Cordonnerie Carinthia with his girlfriend Karen to say hi to her father, shop owner John Rasinger. This friendly visit would turn out to be serendipitous, ushering Dominique into a vocation that he would spend the next three years learning and the next 26 running.
Watching John work with his hands got to him. “I fell in love with it,” he remembers. Up until that day, he had been working as a bike mechanic who was disillusioned by the winter’s long off-seasons. “I was always kind of wondering ‘what the hell am I doing’. It’s not super fun sitting around an apartment and it was hard to find side jobs that correspond with bicycle mechanics,” he recalls.
Despite no prior sewing experience, he asked John if he taught. “‘If you wanna learn’ [John] goes ‘I'll show you, but it's not like a side hustle. You come, you work 40 hours, and I'll show you the trade’.” John was adamant on teaching Dominique the same way he had learned in his uncle's shop in a small Austrian village when he was 14, which consisted of three years of 40-hour work weeks side-by-side.
“It was hard because I'd sit beside him all day long and I'd have to watch him do it because I'd wonder ‘how the hell did you do that?’” It was second nature to John who had been making and repairing shoes for almost 50 years. “But you learn to pay attention. I learned to shut the hell up and watch him and figure it out,” he adds.
John had arrived the same way, more or less. Sometime in the mid-1950s, not long after coming over from Austria, he was walking down Saint-Marc when he passed a storefront with Carinthia written across it, the name of the province he'd grown up in. He went in. The owner turned out to be Austrian too, and a cordonnier and bottier besides. John took a job there and bought the place in 1967.
"You come, you work 40 hours"
Twenty-nine years later and Dominique finds himself “putting everybody who comes in here through exactly the same thing.” He tells the story of one of his current employees, Sabrina, who became an apprentice similarly to himself. “She was at her wits end going 'listen, I'm really good with my hands. I love knitting. I've done a few courses on shoemaking’.” Tired of her office job and in need of lively work, she asked Dominique if he’d be willing to mentor her. “It was just that [which] I could understand completely. I wouldn't be able to work in an office. Sitting on a chair looking at a computer all day, it's just not me.”
Taking in apprentices is the most rewarding part of the job for Dominique. It is also how most begin working in the trade as Quebec has not offered vocational training in shoemaking and repair since 2011.
When leather built the neighbourhood
“There used to be shoemakers like every third corner on Saint-Marc, on Ste-Catherine downtown,” Dominique recalls.
He's set up in the right neighbourhood for it. Montreal's leather trade started in Saint-Henri, or rather in the village that preceded it: the city's first tannery opened along the Saint-Pierre river in 1686, and leather held the place for the better part of two centuries. By 1825, more than 60% of its 466 residents worked in the trade. The name Saint-Henri-des-Tanneries came later, after a chapel went up in 1810.
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