Whatever Happened to the Palace Shoe Service Neon Sign in Rockford?

For decades, a cobbler stood over North Main Street in downtown Rockford, hammering away at the same shoe. People who spent time downtown will remember the enormous Palace Shoe Service sign, the kind of elaborate commercial sign cities used to have before illuminated plastic rectangles became the preferred method of announcing that something was for sale.

The shoemaker on the sign wasn't always standing still. When everything was working properly, his arm moved through a three-part hammering animation. When the hammer came down on the shoe, two red neon sparks flashed at the point of impact. Then he raised the hammer and did it all over again. It was advertising, public art and mechanical theater rolled into one wonderfully unnecessary object.

And now it's gone.

Palace Shoe Service Goes Back to 1926

Palace Shoe Service was one of those increasingly rare Rockford businesses whose history could be measured in generations rather than years. Brothers Joseph and Jasper Giamalva opened the business in downtown Rockford in 1926. According to a history published by the Rockford Historical Society, the brothers had learned shoemaking in Sicily before eventually settling in Rockford.

Their first shop was on the east side of the 100 block of North Main Street. The Palace name wasn't an attempt to make shoe repair sound particularly luxurious. There really was a Palace nearby: the Palace Theatre. Four years after opening, the brothers moved across North Main Street to a location between the Orpheum Theatre and Simon Drug Store.

Downtown Rockford was a very different animal then. One Easter Eve Saturday during the 1930s, Palace reportedly shined 500 pairs of shoes in a single day, at ten cents a shine. Eventually Palace Shoe Service settled at 204 North Main Street, where generations of Rockford residents would know it.

Then Came the Cobbler

The famous Palace Shoe Service sign was built in 1950. It was approximately eight feet wide, and according to roadside-sign historian Debra Jane Seltzer, the shoemaker depicted on it was modeled after John Antunicci, who owned the business at the time.

The animation was what made the thing extraordinary. The cobbler raised his arm, brought the hammer down and two red neon sparks flashed where the hammer met the shoe. Then the sequence repeated. It must have been quite a sight when the neon and animation were completely functional, especially at night on a North Main Street filled with other illuminated theater and business signs.

The sign survived long after elaborate animated neon signs like it stopped being made. It even survived a move from an earlier Palace Shoe Service location to the later shop. By the 2000s and 2010s, it had become less an advertisement than a piece of Rockford folk art. Photographers noticed it. Travelers interested in old roadside America noticed it. Rockford residents certainly noticed it.

Restoring the sign, unfortunately, wasn't cheap. The business reportedly received estimates of $15,000 to $20,000 to bring it back to its former glory. For a family shoe-repair business, that was an enormous expense, so the old cobbler remained above North Main Street without being completely restored.

Ninety-Five Years in Downtown Rockford

Palace Shoe Service survived nearly everything downtown Rockford could throw at it. It survived the Depression, World War II, the decline of the traditional downtown shopping district, shopping malls and an era of inexpensive shoes increasingly designed to be thrown away rather than repaired. It even survived the Palace Theatre that had given the business its name. The theater was demolished in 1984.

Palace remained associated with the Giamalva family through four generations. In 2021, the Greater Rockford Italian American Association recognized the family and the remarkable longevity of Palace Shoe Service. By then, however, one of downtown Rockford's longest-running businesses was nearing the end of its story. After roughly 95 years, Palace Shoe Service closed.

Sometime afterward, the cobbler disappeared too.

RoadsideArchitecture.com, which documented the Palace sign over the years, records the business as closed and shows that by 2023 the famous sign was no longer there. That leaves a question that turns this from another piece of Rockford history into a Rockford mystery.

Where Is the Palace Shoe Service Sign?

An eight-foot-wide animated neon sign built in 1950 doesn't exactly disappear into someone's coat pocket. Somebody removed it from the building, but what happened after that?

Was it scrapped? Was it sold? Did a collector acquire it? Did someone connected with Palace Shoe Service save it? Is it hanging inside another building? Or is Rockford's hammering cobbler sitting quietly in a garage, warehouse or barn somewhere, waiting for somebody to remember him?

So far, I haven't found a reliable public source that answers that question. There is, however, reason to hope that "gone" doesn't necessarily mean destroyed.

Rockford has lost other spectacular old signs from its streets without necessarily losing the signs themselves. The signs at Parthenios Luncheonette at 132 North Church Street survived after the restaurant closed in 2010. Those signs had originally belonged to Hobson Drug Company and may have dated to the 1940s or earlier. One of the vertical signs once alternated between FOOD and DRUGS in neon. The signs were eventually removed in 2017, sold at auction and reportedly entered a private collection.

The old Der Rathskeller sign also survived the closing of the restaurant it advertised and was eventually sold to a private collector. Somewhere, pieces of the Rockford streetscape that many people assume vanished forever are apparently still out there.

Maybe the Palace cobbler is one of them.

Help Us Solve a Rockford Mystery

This is where Rockford Blog readers come in. If you know what happened to the Palace Shoe Service sign after the business closed, we'd like to hear about it. Maybe you knew the Giamalva family, worked downtown, saw the sign being removed or heard that somebody bought it. Maybe you've actually seen it since it disappeared from North Main Street.

And if you have old photographs of the Palace Shoe Service sign when the neon and animation were still working, those are part of this story too. There must be photographs scattered through Rockford family albums showing North Main Street when the cobbler was still hammering away above the sidewalk.

For more than seventy years, he stood above Rockford working on the same shoe. That's long enough to earn an ending to the story.

So, Rockford: whatever happened to the Palace Shoe Service cobbler?