Downtown Minneapolis loses some sparkle as veteran shoe shiner hangs up her brushes

Lisa Cotton took in your weary, salt-crusted shoes battered by Minnesota winters. Without judgment, she polished and buffed them back to life.

When you stepped off of her stand on the first floor of the IDS Center, you gazed at your rejuvenated leather uppers and thought, "Oh, there you are, you beautiful pair," and remembered why you fell in love with them in the first place.

And she noticed the change in you.

"Instant gratification," Cotton said, when I asked her why she stayed in the shoeshine business for more than three decades. "It is art. I love seeing the before and after. I love it when people leave my chair, how different they feel."

Cotton ended her shoe shining career on Tuesday, 31 years to the day after she got her start in the business. As one of the last remaining shoe shiners in downtown Minneapolis, the 56-year-old entrepreneur decided to hang up her brushes at a time when the dearth of office workers has put a behemoth of a question mark on the future of the city's core.

Cotton experienced the best and worst of humanity, sometimes on the same day. Her customers ran the gamut from judges and investment brokers to janitors and homeless people.

Why did they trust their shoes with Cotton?

"Because she's the best," said attorney Sam Kaplan, former ambassador to Morocco, who was seated in her chair last week.

And she kept giving it her best, showing up for work amid the darkest days of the pandemic.

"As soon as March 2020 hit, one day I was thriving, and the next day there was nothing here at all," she recalled in a deliberate, serene voice befitting a yoga instructor. "It was almost apocalyptic. Even Starbucks was closed, and that was tragic to me."

In normal times, she averaged 30 customers a day. Before she wound down her business, it was more like five to 10. With downtown firms continuing to push back their return-to-work dates, many of their employees are continuing to clock in from home. And shoes — wait, what are those?

But Cotton kept reporting for duty, not only during the height of the pandemic, but through most of the turmoil following George Floyd's murder. If this familiar face was setting up her stand in the morning, it meant the world was still spinning.

"She's a gentle voice of calm and peace at a time when people didn't feel very calm or peaceful," said customer Mark Oyaas, adding that Cotton can draw out stories from everyone she befriends. "She's kind of a bartender without booze."

Just a couple of weeks ago, two longtime patrons surprised Cotton with a cash gift to give her business a much-needed boost. She was able to make a car payment with it.

That generous gesture reminded her of one of her core beliefs: "We are all put here to love and be loved, to take care of each other," she said.

Later that same afternoon, she passed two other men in the skyway. One called her the N-word under his mask.

"I stopped. My brain almost said, 'Lisa, he didn't say that.' But I heard it clear as day," she said. "Clearly, he hates his life. I love my life. It's not my problem."

Cotton shared both incidents in a video she posted to Instagram, telling her followers that no one has a right to take away your light. "Please know who you are, and know that you are deserving of the best of this life."

"Unfortunately, the hate is still out there, and we just need to talk about it," she told me.

In her own quiet way, Cotton is constantly reminding people of their shared humanity. After Floyd's murder, she noticed that many of her white customers didn't want to broach the subject of race and the devaluing of Black lives. She designed and started selling T-shirts and hoodies that showed a sketch of a hand, and under it, the word "human."

A native of north Minneapolis, Cotton began working for an all-women squad of shoe shiners in 1991. Along the way she bought a house in St. Paul and sent her daughter to George Washington University. She plans to pass on her shoe shine stand to a friend while Cotton pursues a new beginning: working in another friend's restaurant that is expected to open in the former Ecolab building in downtown St. Paul.

How did she know it was time to move on?

"I noticed myself cringing when I was sitting and waiting," she said, referring to slower days on the job. "I will always have a love for it, but I was losing the 'like' of it."

As we were talking, a fellow North Sider and downtown worker named Richard dropped in to chat. He told me Cotton has helped him ease up on some of his hardened views.

"What I might find sad, Lisa finds funny. One day there was a gentleman in the pond back there who was taking coins out of the pond," Richard said, gesturing to the reflecting pool behind him. "I found it disgusting."

"I just started laughing," Lisa recalled, saying she found it amusing that there were help-wanted signs posted everywhere, yet the young man was choosing to take coins out of the infinity pool.

"She helps me balance my perspective," Richard said with a smile, "so I don't get too hard-core."

People like Cotton make downtown what it is, as different as it feels these days. No one knows how the heart of this city will rebuild or revitalize. Her customer Oyaas says Cotton was a thread that tied a lot of people together, an individual who made the place special.

And that contagious sense of calm came from a woman who's unafraid of reinvention. A woman who grasps her worth.

When the coward in the skyway called her that nasty, shameful word, Cotton knew better than to expend energy on him.

"Why hate? Why waste my time?" she told me. "I've got a dream to catch."