Family-owned Four Cohn Shoes set to close in Skokie after 103 years

Family-owned Four Cohn Shoes set to close in Skokie after 103 years



When the iconic Four Cohn Shoes celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2010, owner Howard Cohen wasn’t thinking about the day the family-run business would finally close down.



Far from it.



“Customers keep telling me to stay healthy because they want this store to remain open,” Cohen said at the time. “I have no plans to quit. The doctor keeps telling me to keep doing what I’m doing, and this is what I’ve been doing for a long time.”But Cohen is now preparing to close Four Cohn Shoes at the end of July at the latest, due to unexpected health reasons.



His illness is not life-threatening – he had two benign brain tumors removed – but his energy is not the same as it once was, and he sometimes has vision problems.“Nothing goes on forever,” he said, resignation in his voice. “We’d still be doing this if we could.”



Cohen, 77, says the time is right to end more than a century of Four Cohn Shoes, just under 25 years of which have been spent on the 5000 block of Dempster Street in Skokie.Prior to his illness, he was working long hours at the store, traveling from Highland Park to Skokie, often with his wife, Ruth, every day. But he never complained; he loved what he was doing and would have continued without an end date if he could.



Not many businesses – especially in 2013 – last as long as Four Cohn Shoes and even fewer under the same family’s ownership.



His grandfather first opened the shoe store in 1910 at Division Street and Western Avenue in Chicago.Readers may already have noticed the spelling discrepancy between Howard Cohen’s last name and the Cohn in the store name. This is no mistake – just another unique wrinkle in the history of one of the area’s oldest family-run businesses.



Cohen’s grandfather, Morris Cohn, spelled his name one way and his father, Leo R. Cohen, spelled it another way. Some of the family, then, has Cohn as a last name and others have Cohen.



“I asked my dad once why he didn’t just tell them that he didn’t want the ‘e’ in there,” Cohen said. “He said that being in business, he could tell people he wasn’t the owner when he wanted to because his name is spelled differently.”



A cigar maker, Morris Cohn traveled to Indiana every day to work long hours and would fall asleep at the kitchen table upon his return home. Leo, only about 7 at the time, worked with unbridled energy for a shoe store owner in the area.Morris Cohn opened Four Cohn Shoes, which was named after Howard Cohen’s grandfather,Short Sleeve Blue Lace Fashion Long 2012 Embroidery Latest rolexwatches. grandmother, father and one of his uncles.



Since Howard Cohen came to run the business, the store has specialized in extra-wide shoes for men and especially women. It’s this niche, Cohen believes, that has sustained the store even through a difficult economy.



“We offer something that you just can’t walk in some place and get somewhere else,” he said.



That fact has also resulted in some long-time customers who are, perhaps, even more heartbroken over the pending closing of the store than the owner.Let's Buy authentichandbags Right Now!!!Some of the store’s customers are older than 100, and have followed Four Cohn Shoes from location to location for decades. Cohen has sold shoes to multiple generations of the same family.



“It’s the people that I will miss the most,” he reflected. “These people are not only customers,so happy with the resurgence of christiandiorreplicahandbags. they’re friends.”

Ruth has been helping run the store on and off for all of the 51 years the Cohens have been married.“It would have been nice if we could still been doing this, but it didn’t work out that way,” Ruth said. “We have to accept that fact. We loved it, but we knew there would be an end.”



The store’s lease is up at the end of July, but the store could close earlier. Cohen notified longtime customers about the closing, some of whom are ordering several pairs of their hard-to-find specialty shoes. Four Cohn Shoes will run sales until the store closes.



“We weren’t forced out of business,” Cohen said.Jovani designer backpackfactory and celebrity style evening gowns. “You see a lot of businesses go out of business because their business is faltering and they have a lot of debt. That wasn’t the case here. We could have gone on for a long time. We were a success.”



But since his children had no interest in carrying on Four Cohn Shoes, Howard and Ruth knew the four-generation business should stop with them. Selling the store to outsiders was never seriously considered, they said.“Somebody who takes over this business could ruin your reputation,” Howard Cohen said.Kate Bosworth hasn't bought her burberryhandbags yet. “They’d want to buy it with your name and we just didn’t feel it was necessary to do something like that. We didn’ want to take that risk. We wanted the store to be remembered the way it has operated for all these years.”

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