Someone broke this shoe shop’s window. The owner saw a head-turning opportunity.

Every day this week, Steve Jamison has wiped dozens of fingerprints off the large spiderweb of cracks running through the front window of his Center City store, Blue Sole Shoes.

“I see people rubbing their fingers along the glass to see if it’s fake,” he said.

It’s not just the cracks that customers and passersby find hard to believe — this is Philly, after all, where we have cracks in our sidewalks and our tourist attractions — it’s what appears to have caused the cracks that’s completely confounding.

Well above street level, apparently lodged into the front window of Blue Sole Shoes, as if it were hurled there by an angry Hulk during a shoe-fitting gone awry, is a stylish men’s brown boot from Florence Shoes of Italy.

The window dressing is part vandalism, part guerrilla marketing, and 100% Philly ingenuity. For when Jamison’s store glass was vandalized earlier this month, instead of being shattered, he saw it as a chance to turn his pane into a pleasure for others.

“People have been coming in all the time and asking if it’s real. It’s really been a lot of fun,” he said. “If people can feel better when they see it, then it’s enough for me.”

Jamison, a Nicetown native and married father now living in East Oak Lane, opened Blue Sole Shoes on Chestnut Street near 18th in 2007. He was inspired to get into men’s fashion shoes because he never forgot how good he felt in the pair of Pierre Cardins his mom bought him when he was about 6 years old.

“So many people complimented me on my shoes and how great I looked in them. I just wanted to recreate that experience for people today, to be able to dress them up and help them feel better about themselves,” he said.

In his 18 years in business, Jamison has developed a cadre of loyal customers. Even celebrities like Steve Harvey, Alice Cooper, and Bernard Hopkins have stopped by to shop at his store.

Aug. 11 should have been a day like any other, but when Jamison arrived at work, he found his front window was damaged.

I asked him what his first thought was.

“Damn,” he said.

“Yeah, that would have been mine, too,” I said.

Jamison told me his surveillance video showed a man, whom he believed to be unhoused, pick up loose bricks from the ground near his store. The man then walked by the store, came back, and threw a brick at the window of Blue Sole Shoes and at the window of the cookie shop next door, Jamison said.

The brick didn’t go all the way through the window of Jamison’s store, but it did cause significant damage, with fissures radiating through the glass from the point of impact. The cookie shop escaped the bricking relatively unharmed.

Police confirmed a police report was filed, and Jamison filed a claim with his insurance company. He has a $1,000 deductible and a glass company estimated it may take up to eight weeks for a new window to be installed.

What really took Jamison aback above all else, though, was how upset his regular customers were to see his store damaged. That’s when he did some real sole searching and, instead of boarding the window until it could be replaced, he decided to step up his game and add a shoe. He used an electric miter saw to cut the boot in half, and on Friday, he epoxied one half to the interior and one half to the exterior of the store.

“I just wanted to create a lighter situation from that experience. I wanted people to feel better when they see it. How often are we faced with a challenge or tough situation and we go down a hole of deep despair or emotional investment, but when you really look at it, it’s just not that bad,” Jamison said. “When I see news stories about Sudan, Gaza, and Ukraine, those are tough situations, but broken glass is not something we should put such emotional investment in.”

What Jamison is talking about is perspective and it’s one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves, but one of the hardest to accept sometimes, too. Feeling sorry for yourself is easy, but having gratitude for what you do have — even and especially when times get tough — is a core trait of the most resilient people I’ve met, and one that shines through in Jamison.

Heck, he doesn’t even hold a grudge against the person who vandalized his window.

“I’d rather be in my situation, in business for 18 years, and have my family to go home to, than be in the position of the person who broke my window any day,” he told me.

In fact, this isn’t the first time Jamison’s store has been vandalized. In 2020, following the peaceful protests in Philadelphia against the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, when opportunists broke into stores and set fires on the streets of Center City, Blue Sole Shoes was among the stores that were hit.

People broke into Jamison’s store then, but he was able to get to his shop quickly and had relatives and strangers back him up.

“There were even people off the street who came in to help move merchandise off the floor to the stockroom. People were coming in to steal stuff and other people were telling them, ‘This is a Black-owned business,’” Jamison recalled. “That was a really tough time. I’m Black and I grew up in the inner city and I understood the anger and frustration from those involved in the vandalism, but because I’m a business owner, I also understood the perspective of the business owner. I didn’t condone the actions, but I understood it. It’s a tough position to be in.”

Putting things into perspective, having a single brick thrown at his window is much easier to deal with, he said.

I admire Jamison’s creativity to use humor as a temporary Band-Aid instead of just boarding up the window. In a city where far too many windows are boarded up, I’d much rather be fascinated and perplexed by a piece of makeshift marketing than saddened by depressing plywood.

As for Jamison, I asked if this latest experience changed the way he feels about his hometown and about owning a business in Philadelphia.

“I feel no different, I am full-on hardcore Philly. That’s the bottom line. We have our challenges, as any city does,” he said. “We have to learn to look at things from a different perspective so we can think more clearly and face our challenges with good intention to solve them.”