Spring does something to men’s hair in this town. of winter beans out, the damage is revealed, and suddenly every guy in Manhattan is staring at his reflection in the subway glass, wondering if it’s time to try something new. it is. And New York, for all its failings of affordability and common sense, remains the best city in America to sit in a barber’s chair, which, for the uninitiated, is a different proposition than the salon. Salon styles. A barber waits. The tools are different (very hot, straight razors, scissors), the training is different, and the loyalty between a man and his barber rivals anything you’d find in a therapist’s office.
The first great barber here was an enslaved Haitian-born man named Pierre Toussaintwho arrived in Manhattan in 1787 and became the most sought-after hairdresser among the city’s elite before buying his freedom in 1807. He is the only layman buried in the crypt beneath St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and every barbershop in New York since then has operated on the principle of Toussaint’s identity, believed 200 years ago: converge.
By 1913, Joseph Mole opened a store on Lexington Avenue that still operates today. What happened on chairs across the city traced every cultural shift that followed. Pompadouri held the post-war decades. Africa, which was a deliberate rejection of the barber’s chair as much as a political statement, nearly killed the industry in the 1970s. It might have remained dead if hip-hop had not revived it with the hi-top fade that erupted from Harlem and Brooklyn in the mid-1980s, which returned barbers to essential cultural cornerstones. That resurgence owed everything to the black barber culture that had sustained the institution through the lean years—shops from the South Bronx to Bed-Stuy functioned as common living rooms and political forums long before the rest of the city remembered that a good barber was worth recognition.
The modern renaissance is, in large part, a rediscovery of something black New Yorkers never lost. Today, the range spans from neighborhood prices to the truly extravagant, with fine work at every level. A city with so many Berbers could never be captured in a single list. There are institutions and innovators in every borough that deserve their own entries, and leaving someone out is an occupational hazard of the format. Neighborhoods matter, but Neighborhood barbers more importance. Here are 16 worth knowing.
