Allan Block, Whose Sandal Shop Was Folk Music Hub, Dies at 90

By BRUCE WEBER         New York Times,  November 3, 2013

 

Allan Block, a leather craftsman and fiddler who made sandals and music in his Greenwich Village shop — which became a bubbling hub of folk music during the 1950s and ’60s; a showcase for talented pickers and singers like Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Doc Watson and Maria Muldaur; and a destination for aspiring musicians like John Sebastian and Bob Dylan — died on Oct. 23 at his home in Francestown, N.H. He was 90.

 

The death was confirmed by his family.

Mr. Block, who studied classical violin growing up in Oshkosh, Wis., was a self-taught sandal maker who helped popularize open-toed footwear. But he was prone to setting aside his leather samples and his awl to pick up a fiddle and jam with the folkies, mountain music makers and acoustic blues players who were wont to drop in with their banjos, guitars, mandolins and other instruments.

The store, the Allan Block Sandal Shop at 171 West Fourth Street, was just a few minutes’ walk from Washington Square Park and from the Folklore Center on Macdougal Street, where perpetual musical performances, both impromptu and planned, made Greenwich Village the red-hot center of the so-called folk revival.

Many evenings and weekend afternoons, the jams migrated to Mr. Block’s store, where the crowds often spilled out the door and onto the sidewalk. According to Mr. Block’s daughter Rory, a blues singer who worked with her father and ran the store after he decamped for New Hampshire in the late 1960s, Bob Dylan dropped by more than once just to chat with her father.

“He’d be sitting in a chair and my dad would be working and they’d be talking,” Ms. Block said about Mr. Dylan in an interview. “And my dad said to me: ‘You see that young man? He’s a poet first and foremost. He values his art above all else. He’s been signed by a label, but he really doesn’t care about the business side of things.’ ”

Mr. Sebastian recalled in an interview on Wednesday that in 1960, when he was 16 and living with his parents on the perimeter of Washington Square Park, soaking up what he called “the folk scene, the doo-wop scene, the beatnik scene, the blues scene,” that he often found himself at the sandal shop.

“This was a place that was an energy power point for the folk music movement,” he said, adding that many of those who played there were his heroes, old-time musicians who were featured on the influential 1952 set of recordings known as the “Anthology of American Folk Music.”

“That particular album was very important for folk singers and people learning guitar in that era,” Mr. Sebastian recalled. “And here were living examples, the people who had been on that anthology, and you could sit in a small wooden kind of room and be with them. It was unbelievable. I saw Son House, Bukka White, John Hurt, and those were just the guys in my part of the bag. I saw Doc Watson. Every guitar player should be discouraged after seeing Doc Watson.”

Allan Forrest Block was born in Oshkosh on Oct. 6, 1923. His father, Isadore, ran a scrap metal business that later expanded into building supplies. After high school, he studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin but never graduated, leaving during World War II to join the American Field Service, which he served as an ambulance driver in India. Afterward, he moved to New York City — where, his brother Daniel said, he first became interested in folk music — and then, for a while, to the woods of New Jersey, near Princeton, where, his brother said, he began making sandals.

Back in New York, his first shop was a tiny hole in the wall on Macdougal Street. According to “Positively Fourth Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña,” by David Hajdu, the West Fourth Street store opened in 1950.

There, Mr. Block’s daughter Mona Young said, he perfected his method of making custom-tailored sandals, complete with arch supports. Customers would choose a style from one of 20 drawings posted on the wall, stand on a piece of cardboard to have their feet traced and then return two or three weeks later for a fitting.

“Whatever weird shape the person’s foot was, that’s the shape the sandal would be,” she said.

Mr. Block’s sandals, famous in their day — the actress Faye Dunaway and musicians including Ms. Baez, Ms. Fariña and members of the band Sha Na Na bought them, Mr. Block’s daughters said, and Suze Rotolo, Mr. Dylan’s onetime girlfriend, lionized them in her memoir of the era, “A Freewheelin’ Time” — were groundbreaking footwear, fashionwise.

“In the beginning, most people saw sandals as something very European or feminine,” Mr. Block told Mr. Hajdu. “White men wouldn’t buy them at all — only black men. Then, I think, people started relating the idea of exposed feet and natural leather and something handmade with folk music and crafts.”

In New Hampshire, Mr. Block continued his leather work; in addition to sandals, he made belts, handbags, guitar straps and other items. He also performed on the fiddle at folk festivals and dances.

In addition to his daughters, Mr. Block, who was married several times, is survived by a son, Paul; a brother, Daniel; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

By some measures, from the mid-1950s through the early ’60s, the frenzy of the folk music revival, an important factor in the emergence of a fervid counterculture, was symbolized by the Allan Block Sandal Shop, where music often trumped capitalism. Sometimes on Saturday afternoons, the store was so crowded with musicians and listeners that business was impossible.

“God help you,” the singer Dave Van Ronk told Mr. Hajdu, “if you wanted to buy a pair of sandals.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 3, 2013, on page A30 of the New York edition with the headline: Allan Block, Whose Sandal Shop Was Folk Music Hub, Dies at 90.