News & Community

A Photo Essay by Tyrone Syranno Wilkens

Words by Amy Scattergood

Lettering by Luke Lucas

arbershops are a refuge of sorts, embedded in rowhouses and lighting up strip malls—the red, white, and blue stripes of their signature poles signaling not only a haircut and shave but a welcoming seat to sit, listen, and talk. It’s in these elaborate chairs—Naughahyde thrones with padded seating, adjustable heights, metal footrests like garden trellises, armrests hinged with atavistic ashtrays—that far more than styling happens. The chairs are portals into a sanctuary. Because the barbershops that still anchor our neighborhoods have historically functioned as community centers, waystations, afterschool hubs, therapists’ offices, trade schools, even food banks.

The best barbers are the gatekeepers of their communities, ad hoc counselors whose support can run from aesthetic tips to professional mentoring to spotting elder abuse to suicide prevention. Barbershops are also oddly beautiful, the barbers’ workstations resembling museum installations: collections of shears, razors, trimmers, and bottles, artwork and photographs, newspaper clippings and framed letters of appreciation, all jigsawed into a haphazard altar of memory and truth.

“It’s more than just cutting hair, there’s a spiritual side. We’re an oasis. We’re a safe space,” says master barber Sundiata Osagie, 49, at the Old Goucher rowhouse that’s home to Reflection Eternal Barbershop. “We have a lot of services at our disposal,” he says, ticking off health and mental-health care, financial advice, jobs, housing, therapy, even services for previously incarcerated folks. Osagie not only provides those services and, well, cuts hair, but mentors neighborhood chess players, some of whom are world-class juniors. “We take it as a responsibility,” says Osagie, clippers in hand, standing behind the shop’s first chair in an O’s cap and a camo barber’s jacket of his own design.

“We talk to people, we get close to people, we are therapists. It’s deeper than cutting hair,” says Ivan Rodriguez, 43, who owns Bmore Cutz, a high-ceilinged, 15-seat, metal-and-glass showroom in a former Maaco body shop installed in a Greektown strip mall. Rodriguez, his arms as artfully decorated as his workstation, began cutting hair after he asked his own barber to teach him the profession. He swept floors, went to school in Dundalk, and worked for a dozen years before opening his own shop, where he gives free back-to-school haircuts to kids and hosts bookbag giveaways.

Clipper City Barber Company sits across the cobblestones from the brick palace of the Sagamore Pendry hotel, and it's swankier than most barbershops. Michael Anthony Jones, 52, a master barber and partner in the year-old shop, got his start in his 20s in his mother’s West Baltimore basement, when his father, then ill with cancer, wanted his hair cut. The shop trains a series of apprentices and hosts cutting classes on Sundays. “We help others get over tragedies. It’s all about care,” says Jones. That care includes offering the service for free to people experiencing homelessness.

On a weekday morning, Carnell Cottrell, 76, sits in the vintage, bright-red barber’s chair at the back of Hair Masters on Dolfield Avenue in West Baltimore, the barbershop he owned until he retired a year ago. He’s cut hair for two and three generations of families and mentored countless barbers over the years, often providing career guidance as well as employment.

“I told him, you can start tomorrow if you stop selling drugs,” Cottrell remembers of one now-master barber. These days he still comes into the shop for news and fellowship, taking a seat in the chair he once stood behind. “I got one in my basement to watch TV. It’s better than a La-Z-Boy.”


Above: No. 1: An airbrush at Hair Masters in West Baltimore; No. 2: The barber's pole at Clipper City; No. 3: Sundiata Osagie finishes off a cut at Reflection Eternal Barbershop; No. 4: Ivan Rodriguez goes in for a close shave at Bmore Cutz. OPENING IMAGE: The interior of Reflection Eternal in Old Goucher.

HAIR MASTERS

Carnell Cottrell, seated below, started cutting hair at Hair Masters in 1966, as a 17-year-old apprentice. Forty-two years later, after serving in Vietnam, going to school for cosmetology, and opening a series of salons, he bought the barbershop, only retiring a year ago. Many barbers have cut behind the chair Cottrell now sits in, including Melvin “Skeet” Fields, to whom Cottrell sold the business, and master barber Ernest Jordan, above. The shop is both barbershop and community hub for Angela Jones and her son Ryan Bethea, seated together below, as Ryan's brother Reign gets a cut. The decades are displayed on the walls, from the folding straight razors, below left, used when the shop first opened to old posters detailing specific cuts and eyebrow styles to a vintage strop, the leather strap used to shape and polish the blades of straight razors.


CLIPPER CITY

Illuminated by a neon skull-and-crossbones as well as a striped barber's pole, Clipper City Barber Company fit right in to the longshoremen taverns and booze-cruise pirate ships of Fells Point when it opened in December of 2023 in an old Thames Street rowhouse. Owner Sam Henig and partner Michael Anthony Jones, lower right, both master barbers, wanted a diverse, community-based barbershop that also focused on teaching and mentorship. “Every barber here can do the whole melting pot,” says Jones of the Clipper City barbers, including John Erick, upper left, who finishes up a trim. The chairs near the front are often helmed by apprentices—the state of Maryland allows three per barbershop—under the watchful eyes of experienced barbers, while Jones takes clients in the stately studio in a back room that opens into a garden patio.


REFLECTION ETERNAL

When Sundiata Osagie, above, in an O’s cap, and Andwele Ra opened Reflection Eternal Barbershop in a St. Paul Street rowhouse in 2015, it quickly became a community center as well as a barbershop. In addition to offering a wealth of social services, the two take on up to three apprentices at a time and have plans to open a barber school in the neighborhood. “The shop was my school,” says Osagie, who began cutting hair as a teenager, first practicing on family and friends because “we couldn't afford a barbershop.” Osagie also mentors chess players in the back of a shop that resembles a pop-up art gallery, with vintage gumball machines, Baltimore Sun articles about their work, and posters and artwork celebrating John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Muhammad Ali, and other jazz and sports legends, as well as the classic barber chairs that are the focal points of the shop.


BMORE CUTZ

It’s an unofficial family day at Bmore Cutz, as owner Ivan Rodriguez is cutting the hair of his son, Gianni, who sits in the first chair of his father’s 15-chair Greektown barbershop, above. Rodriguez employs 17 barbers, including Anderson Herrera and Randy Espaillat, below, many of whom display the kind of intricate, often barber-themed tattoo art that Rodriguez has. The former garage is a lofty showroom, with illuminated barber poles, a gallery of tools like a duster brush and clippers, pictured, and a projection screen that often shows soccer games. “Sometimes we just talk about sports, no politics,” says Rodriguez, who is originally from Mexico City, as his manager José Bonilla, who came to Baltimore from El Salvador, nods in agreement. Rodriguez made house calls during COVID, as he’d just opened Bmore Cutz when the pandemic hit. “We mix old-school barbering with new-school.”

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