No. 01 — Feature
The Story of Union Street
On a corner that has outlived five machine shops, one barbershop has kept the same four chairs facing the same window for sixty-four years.
In the spring of 1962, a sign painter named Walt Doss borrowed four hundred dollars, rented the ground floor of a brick storefront at 214 Union Street, and bolted down two barber chairs he'd bought secondhand from a shop that was closing in Astoria. He cut hair there for thirty-one years, charging a dollar twenty-five for a trim and never once raising his price faster than his customers' wages rose. When his knees finally gave out in 1993, the shop passed to Sal Kowalczyk, the apprentice who had swept Walt's floors since he was fifteen.
Sal ran Union Barber for eleven years, added the third and fourth chairs, and taught the trade to a serious, quiet kid named Del Osei, who apprenticed under him starting in 1998. When Sal retired to the coast in 2004, he sold Del the shop for less than it was worth and made him promise exactly one thing: never turn it into something a barber from 1962 wouldn't recognize.
A good haircut is unhurried. Everything else in this city moves fast enough to make up for it.— Del Osei, Proprietor, Chair One
Del kept the promise, mostly. The chairs are the same four Sal bought, reupholstered twice. The bell above the door is the third bell, but it rings the same note. What's changed is who's cutting: alongside Del now are Frankie, Marisol and Theo, three barbers who trained on three different continents and somehow agree on the one thing that matters, which is that nobody gets rushed out of the chair.
Union Street itself has thinned out — the machine shops became live-work lofts, the hardware store became two hardware stores' worth of hardware crammed into one, and the barbershop next door closed in 2011. Union Barber Co. is, as far as anyone working there can tell, the last shop on the block that was also there for the street's last decade of shops.