The Rise And Fall Of The Barbershop

It’s unclear why men and women felt the need to remove hair from their faces and bodies in the first place. It’s gone on since cave man days. Long before Christ walked this earth Alexander the Great was reportedly obsessed with shaving his face and body and would never enter battle with a five o’clock shadow. Early Greek women removed hair from their legs by singeing it off with a lamp, and Roman women used creams made from exotic ingredients like bat’s blood and powdered viper as daily hair removers. It was obviously important to both sexes and remains so today.

There is not room in this article to trace the evolution of dipilatories from ancient times to the present so let’s jump to the mid 19^th century A.D. when the barons of commerce (and their ladies) had developed the smoothing of skin to a fine art form. For men: enter the Barbershop. If we were to look inside a typical barbershop of the period our sight would reveal a room with pressed tin ceilings, gas lamps, wooden floors and brass spittoons. Mounted chairs with thick leather seats and backrests stood like sentinels waiting for their hosts and on the back wall of the room hung a rack of custom decorated shaving mugs. This was a place of refuge, a place to smoke large cigars and smell fine bay rum..to have one’s shoes shined and tell dirty jokes in the company of your cronies, all the while gently pursuing the purpose of it all - to remove one’s hair. Behold the golden age of barbering!

Fast forward to Grand Central Station, circa 1950. The same product, hair removal. But now the shoe shine stands have grown into wooden monuments and rows of porcelain finished chairs line up in front of white tile walls. Old black men hand out towels for tips in front of toilet stalls. The straight razor rules. It’s all business.

At the turn of the twenty-first century we are left to ponder where it all went. Now barbershops that remain are low key affairs with no swank or swagger. Those with money go to tony salons to recapture the glow of a past age. Metrosex rules. There are no-smoking signs, linoleum floors and little conversation. Advertising all about warns us to be sleek and shorn. But alas, the barbershop mystique has gone from our lives with the civilization that spawned it and we, like Alexander before us, march into battle shorn -

But essentially, alone.