For decades, Astor Place Hairstylists has stood at the edge of Manhattan’s East Village neighborhood, its barbers guiding residents of a style-conscious city through ever-shifting hair trends.
Part of the shop’s lure and lore was the telling of how it almost closed in the 1970s. The family-owned shop saved itself when its barbers began doling out buzz cuts and Mohawks to customers from the city’s emerging punk scene.
It became a beacon of New York City cool and maintained a status as a place where celebrities, tourists and ordinary New Yorkers could go for a cheap, reliable and fashionable cut. Even Mayor Bill de Blasio got his hair cut there. But last week, the owners of Astor Place Hairstylists told their barbers, shampooers and cleaners that the shop would close next month, just before Thanksgiving.
The shop could not recover from the toll of the coronavirus pandemic. A steady stream of customers has dwindled to a few people a day, not nearly enough to stay open.
“It’s a sad situation, and an unceremonious way to go,” Paul Vezza, one of the salon’s owners, said on Monday. “But the pandemic has no mercy.”
Astor Place Hairstylists is just one of many beloved city institutions to falter in the face of the pandemic that has killed tens of thousands of New Yorkers and has upended the city’s economy.
Hampered by capacity limits, beloved mom-and-pop and fine-dining restaurants alike have shuttered their doors. With tourism devastated, some of the city’s biggest hotels have closed for good, taking jobs with them.
Thousands of neighborhood stores and small businesses have already closed, pointing to plummeting revenue, mounting rent backlogs and diminished foot traffic. In August, a report by an influential city business group estimated that when the pandemic eventually abates, roughly one-third of the city’s 240,000 small businesses might not reopen.
On Friday, the same day that Mr. Vezza told employees of his shop’s closing, the neighborhood was reeling from another potential hit. Just blocks uptown, the Strand, perhaps the city’s most famous independent bookstore, posted on social media that it too was in danger of closing after its revenue had dropped precipitously.
Over the weekend, news of the barbershop’s looming closing spread across social media and local news, eliciting a torrent of distraught comments from current and former customers.
Katie Bernstein, 27, said she had been getting her hair regularly trimmed at Astor Place Hairstylists for 13 years, since her family first made the trip from Brooklyn at the recommendation of her aunt.
“It was so cool,” Ms. Bernstein recalled. “You were like, ‘I’m a city person! I go down to this basement to get my haircut. And everyone’s there!’”
Despite her loyalty to the shop, Ms. Bernstein said she had not been there since spring. She had been avoiding trips that could bring her in contact with the virus.
She was not the only customer staying away. Business was still slow on Monday morning, despite well-wishers on social media, Mr. Vezza said. By 11 a.m. the shop had seen just “a handful” of customers — a far cry from pre-pandemic days when the floor would have been bustling.
“We stayed open through hurricanes, we made it through 9/11, and this was the one that finally did it,” Mr. Vezza said of the coronavirus.
Mr. Vezza’s grandfather opened Astor Place Hairstylists in the 1940s with fewer than a dozen chairs. The store has remained in his family’s hands: Mr. Vezza’s father and uncle took over in the 1960s, and Mr. Vezza and his brother are the third generation to take the reins.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the East Village became the mecca of punk, Astor Place Hairstylists truly boomed, offering spiked hair and edgy cuts to droves of young New Yorkers.
“In the 70s, my father and uncle hired this little Italian guy, and we started doing these spiky cuts, with gel and everything,” Mr. Vezza said. “And then we were busy, all through the ’80s and ’90s.”
In those boom times, customers descended the stairs to a brightly lit basement space that buzzed with energy, with clipped hair piling on the floor as barbers milled about dozens of stalls. The shop expanded, eventually taking over two floors. The walls and mirrors practically teemed with photos of customers — both the boldfaced names and longtime patrons grateful for their cuts.
Hilary Swank, David Blaine, Robert De Niro and Andy Warhol are all said to have had haircuts there.
Even as the shop became one of Manhattan’s hipper hairstyling shops, the services remained cheap — a simple shear is currently $23 — and the trendy dos and prices attracted a diverse clientele.
As gentrification hit the neighborhood, Mr. Vezza and his brother faced rising rent costs and by 2004 had downsized to the basement of 2 Astor Place.
Still, there were enough customers to stay afloat, he said, until this March, when city and state officials forced nonessential businesses to shut down.
Mr. Vezza and his staff eagerly awaited the day that pandemic restrictions would be lifted and their customers could return.
When the moment finally came in late June, New Yorkers indeed returned to the shop for long-delayed grooming — including Mr. de Blasio, who made his haircut a press appearance to celebrate the city’s reopening.
But within days, the flow of customers slowed to a trickle.
The space has been decidedly quieter. Fewer barbers have come to work, and the stations now have plastic partitions to enforce the social distancing required by the state.
The office workers who got a quick midday trim had vanished. Regular customers had left the city, and tourists no longer stopped by hoping that they’d occupy the same seat as one of the luminaries on the barbershop’s walls.
It was clear the business would not recover, Mr. Vezza said.
After news of the shop’s closing spread, Mr. de Blasio dropped by the store on Saturday, offering his cellphone number and vowing to provide assistance. Mr. Vezza said.
Bill Neidhardt, a spokesman for the mayor, confirmed the visit, saying Mr. de Blasio was “looking to save this true New York institution, and is currently in discussions.”
A GoFundMe also sprang up, soliciting donations to help the staff. More than 30 people will probably be out of work by the holidays.
But while he appreciated those efforts, Mr. Vezza said that nothing short of a miracle would stop the barbershop from hanging up its clippers.
“You know, unless you have a vaccine in your pocket that’s going to make things go away tomorrow, nothing is going to change for us,” he said.
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