Fulton County, NY - Gloversville. The tradition continues

As dusk fell on Gloversville, I walked down Main Street. I stopped dead in my tracks and peered through the window of the tiny glove shop. Looking just past the window display, I could see a light still on in the workshop. It was after hours but I was leaving town the next day and didn't want to miss a chance to witness history.

I knocked on the door and Daniel Storto, a man much hipper than his blue-collar neighbors, answered.

Storto is not a Gloversville native - something unusual in itself in this small industrial upstate New York town. More unusual is that he is a glove-maker. Perhaps the last one in a town named for the craftsmen that built it.

Storto is a native of Toronto and a learned his trade along side his grandfather. Working in a small shop with no heat, Storto carries on the tradition that named this city one custom pair of gloves at a time. His work has covered the hands of Hillary Clinton, who discovered his shop while a New York Senator working just down the road in Albany, and perhaps most famously Madonna when she and Britney Spears locked lips on stage.

After years of working with stars in both LA and New York, Storto was looking for a quiet place to settle down and make gloves, and he picked Gloversville for its history in the art he loves.

As well as working to make gloves he is restoring a turn-of-the-century glove factory in town where he hopes to have a museum where visitors can watch the glove making process as it used to be. Jeffrey S. Otto -