4 Photos
Frances Jones was among the first to help sort through the mountains of shoes to find matched pairs. Michael Wright
Hamptons Community Outreach was given about 7,200 pairs of high end running sneakers that were drenched when the basement of Gubbins Running Ahead in East Hampton was flooded in February.
When the shoes were recovered from the basement of the flooded store, they were haphazardly stuffed into bags without attention to whether matched pairs went in together, meaning they shoes have to be painstakingly reconnected with their mates. MICHAEL WRIGHT
Chuck MacWhinnie is organizing the sorting of the shoes in a Southampton garage so they can be donated or sold to raise funds for charity. MICHAEL WRIGHT
After the basement of his family’s venerable sporting goods store, Gubbins Running Ahead in East Hampton Village, was flooded when a pipe burst in an adjoining store in late February, owner Geary Gubbins was left with nearly $1 million worth of high end sneakers that he could never sell.
The water that flooded the basement was clean and the shoes were only soaked for a few hours, but from a commercial standpoint, they were worthless. His insurance company would reimburse him the more than $400,000 he’d paid for the approximately 7,200 pairs of shoes by brands like Hoka, On Cloud, New Balance and Adidas, so he could replace them as he tries to get the story reopened by summer.
The insurance company had to inventory them so they were lugged up from the basement, stuffed into plastic bags and piled into one of the PODS storage containers set up in the village parking lot for the owners of stores whose goods were drenched. And there they sat for the last month.
After finally getting signed off by the insurance company, Gubbins said he was left with the thousands of some of the most popular shoes in the country that had nothing wrong with them other than that they were wet.
“They looked fine and they’re nice shoes, so it seemed stupid to just throw them away,” he said last weekend. “I asked [Mayor Jerry Larsen] and they recommended this charity, Hamptons Community Outreach … and they said they’d take them.”
Now the shoes are Chuck MacWhinnie’s problem.
When MacWhinnie pulled his 20-foot construction trailer into the East Hampton parking lot on Saturday, March 25, and threw open the doors of the PODS container, he was confronted with a mountain of clear plastic bags — 563 bags, each with about 12 pairs of shoes in them — twinkling with a kaleidoscope of colors.
“We had to make two trips,” MacWhinnie said, standing amid a mountain of the shoes, still in the plastic bags, in a Southampton garage on Sunday. “Luckily, the water was clean, and it’s been cold and they were sealed in the container, so they aren’t smelly or moldy.”
They were still damp, primarily because the paper stuffing in many of them had not been removed when they were rescued from the Gubbins basement. The real problem facing the charity was sorting the shoes, since the cardboard shoeboxes they had come in had disintegrated in the flood and the shoes had mingled and mixed during the removal from the store basement, the bagging and the storage.
“We’re going to need a lot of help,” MacWhinnie sighed, as he surveyed the mountain of mismatched shoes before him.
On Sunday afternoon, Frances Jones was the lone volunteer on hand helping sort through them. After about an hour, she had mated up about 50 pairs of shoes and lined them up in the sun to dry — 7,150 pairs to go.
“It’s very zen,” she said, as she picked up a bright orange shoe, lifting the tongue to check the size, and then scanning through the small pile in front of her to see if any at least matched the brand. Soon she grabbed another plastic bag and dumped it into a new pile.
The process was sure to be slow going.
“First and foremost, we need to get them dried out and matched, then we’ll know what we can do with them,” MacWhinnie said.
Hamptons Community Outreach is a Bridgehampton-based charity that since 2019 has run a variety of programs from food and diaper drives to home repairs and school tutoring.
MacWhinnie, a co-founder of HCO, said that once the shoes are sorted, the group will go in search of a resource for them to either be given away to those in need or sold — the shoes would have sold for as much as $240 a pair new — to fund charitable programs.
On Monday, ServPro of the Hamptons, a commercial clean-up and salvage business that specializes in cleaning up in the wake of floods and fires, donated its services and set up dehumidifiers and heaters in the garage to dry out all the shoes en masse.
MacWhinnie said that the group is organizing a group of volunteers to attack the shoe pile over the weekend and hopefully get all the shoes matched up again.
“Eventually,” he said, “this is going to make some people very happy.”
Michael Wright on Mar 29, 2023