
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.”