What’s the cheapest haircut you’ve ever gotten? Aside from getting a free cut from Mom, I had never before heard of a “professional” haircut that cost less than $15. When the kids were younger and didn’t have a zillion activities going on on the weekends, we loved to drive into Manhattan on the weekends and sometimes even ventured down to Chinatown for some shopping and dim sum. One day we saw something that stopped us in our tracks.
Typical sign in Chinatown, photo by Nick Carr scoutingnyc.com
$8 Haircut?? $7 for Men and children? It was very hard to believe but we considered it a good sign that the people in the chairs had pretty decent haircuts and there were several people waiting for their turn. The boys all took their turns and ended up with haircuts that were better than any we had gotten in our neighborhood. All the way home, we wondered, how could they do it? How many cuts would they need to do in a day to make a living wage?
Chinatown is truly an amazing and historical nook in Manhattan where the normal rules of modern American society often don’t apply. Check out today’s blog post by Nick Carr, a location scout in NYC whose job it is to find the most intersting and unique locations for feature films. He says that one of his all time favorite spots in NYC is “Bloody Angle”, the nickname given to Doyle Street, one of the few curved streets in Manhattan which was also the site of many gang street battles and murders.
"Bloody Angle" 2010, photo by Nick Carr, scoutingnyc.com
Same location 1909 via Library of Congress.
Hopefully Chinatown will always remain the fascinating place that it is and resist the gentrification and worse the mallification that is spreading all over the country and NYC. Check out Doyle Street on your next trip to the big apple and if you’re feeling really adventurous, you might even try the $8 haircut.
