
6
BROOKLYN WEEKLY, FEBRUARY 9, 2020
THE FINAL CUT
Park Slope’s oldest barbershop closes after more than a century
BY BEN VERDE
In sunny 1903, Maurice Garin
won the inaugural Tour de France,
Prussia became the fi rst nation
to require mandatory drivers licenses,
the original Teddy bear
was exhibited at the Leipzig Toy
Fair, and a new business debuted
on Seventh Avenue — Park Slope
Barber.
The newly opened barbershop
would go on to become one of the
neighborhood’s oldest continuously
operated businesses, weathering
recessions, changing fashions,
and radical demographic
shifts, as time worked its magic
around a business that changed
very little over the years. Customers
were still seated in antique
leather barber chairs and accepted
change from a 100-year-old brass
cash register, although one ancient
appliance, used to heat up towels,
sat unused in recent decades — the
Health Department banned them
in the 1960s after they found barbers
were using them to keep their
sandwiches warm.
That all changed last month,
however, when the business’s sole
remaining proprietor, one of three
brothers who once labored together
over an uncountable legion
of shaggy mops, found himself cutting
hair without his siblings’ company,
and decided it was time to
hang up his shears.
“I always felt it was my brother’s
place,” said John Fiumefreddo,
74, who worked in the shop for over
50 years. “Being there by myself, I
just got these feelings.”
The Fiumefreddo brothers —
including Angelo Fiumefreddo,
who passed away two years ago at
the age of 79, and Vito Fiumefreddo,
who retired to Florida fi ve years
ago — inherited the barbershop
from their father, who purchased
the storefront in 1948, before leaving
it to Angelo in the wake of his
own retirement. The barbershop
had fi rst opened 45 years earlier,
although you wouldn’t know it by
the awning, which declared its
opening as 1904, nor by the painting
in the window, which advertised
its opening date as 1906.
“The guy made a mistake and
we said ‘well what’s the difference,'”
said Fiumefreddo.
Even before taking up their father’s
mantle, the Fiumefreddo
brothers, who grew up down the
block from Park Slope Barber’s
storefront between Third and
Fourth streets, labored there as
teens, and remained young men
when the great barber-depression
of the 1960s — the hippie movement
— swept the nation, leading
impressionable young men to eschew
buzz cuts in favor of wild, unkempt
manes.
The siblings didn’t favor the
stylings of the counter-cultural
movement themselves — John Fiumefreddo
described it as “sloppy”
— but the barber credits their relative
youth as compared to the owners
of more old-fashioned barbershops
for their ability to weather
the dwindling demands for a trim.
And as many older barbers
shuttered, the Fiumefreddos
adapted, embracing this newfangled
idea of a “unisex salon,”
according to John Fiumefreddo,
who said the Park Slope Barber
attracted its fair share of female
customers despite the shop’s nofrills
style.
“We even did a few permanents,
but those were far and few
between,” he said.
Of course, the hippie movement
didn’t last forever, and after cutting
hair for 50 years, Fiumefreddo
claims a modicum of perspective
on the evolution of men’s hairstyles,
which he says are cyclical
in nature.
“What goes around comes
around,” he said. “Right now you
have a lot of hairstyles similar to
those in the thirties and forties,
where it’s short and neat on the
sides and longer on top.”
From their perch in the heart of
Park Slope, the barbers were frontrow
spectators to the phenomenon
of gentrifi cation, watching
as a working-class enclave transformed
into the bougie, stroller
capital of Brooklyn, stripping out
some of the area’s character in the
process, according to John Fiumefreddo.
“When I was there it was a
neighborhood, now it’s just a place
to come to,” he said. “It doesn’t have
that neighborhood feel anymore.”
But even as the neighborhood
changed, Park Slope Barber remained
much the same. Many of
the same old regulars continued to
crowd into the shop — even if they
didn’t need a trim — and local musicians
occasionally hauled their
guitars in to share a tune, Fiumefreddo
said.
And while the barbershop is
closed today, Fiumefreddo says
there are some rumblings within
the family that a younger relative
may take the reins, but as of now,
nothing is certain other than his
retirement.
“You never know, it might come
back again,” he said. “It would be
nice.”
Angelo Fiumefreddo works on a customer.
Courtesy of the Fiumefreddo family
The three brothers worked at the shop for decades. Courtesy of the Fiumefreddo family
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