The Reinhart Brothers Shoe Store Mural

A lace-up work boot the size of a doorway, drawn in confident single-color linework, hangs from a painted bracket like a trade sign made of brick. The lettering beside it says what the sign would have said: REINHART BROS. Quality Shoes.

A shoe store that lasted a century

The Reinhart family’s shoe business was one of downtown Algoma’s fixtures. Mathias Reinhart and Mathias Melchior built the Reinhart Building in 1879, and the family sold shoes there until 1983, with another owner carrying the business on to 1991. More than a hundred years of one family fitting one town’s feet. The mural was sponsored by the Reinhart family themselves, the second wall in the set (with the Kohlbeck tailors mural) where the family behind a vanished business paid to put its memory back on brick.

The boot-as-trade-sign composition is a deliberate piece of sign-painting history too: before universal literacy, a shoemaker hung a boot, and the mural paints that convention rather than a storefront scene.

Who painted it

The project leading artist was David Petri, and his name matters more than any other in this register. Petri was the local Walldog whose presence in the community brought the Walldog Wave to Algoma in the first place; he served as the event’s coordinator and directed the whole ten-wall project, while also leading this wall, the Native American mural near the waterfront, and the “Big Jim” steam-heritage panel. The Main Street Program’s walking-tour brochure lists this wall as entry K in the lettered mural key.

The Walldog Wave

Over three days, June 21 to 23, 2007, more than one hundred Walldogs, the international guild of mural and sign painters who keep the old hand-lettering craft alive, painted ten murals on historic downtown Algoma buildings, under Petri’s direction and with the Algoma Main Street Program organizing. Community members fed and housed the visiting painters, and on one Saturday some 65 residents picked up brushes themselves. This register documents every wall in the set.

If you painted here in 2007, or have photographs from that week, we would genuinely like to hear from you.

Sources

• Historic Algoma Walking Tour, Volume II (Algoma Main Street Program brochure; ed. Leon Raether)
• Door County Pulse: A Community’s Vision, the Murals of Algoma (2018)
• The Walldogs, past events: Walldog Wave, Algoma 2007 (via Internet Archive)