Pittsburgh’s Black-owned barber shops are an important part of the city’s history. They are the quintessential African American third spaces: places where business is transacted, information is exchanged, and social ties are maintained. They are places where the built environment meets intangible cultural heritage and they are ripe for a closer examination before the buildings and the people that make them special disappear forever.

Pittsburgh Planning Director Karen Abrams, at the February 2023 Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission meeting, observed that the city may be filled with sites planners and preservationists don’t know about or have historically ignored. “How we can bring light to some things that have just been not on our radars in the city, that are in predominantly Black neighborhoods,” Abrams said in a discussion of the National Register nomination for a house in Homewood once owned by Pittsburgh barber and gambling entrepreneur William “Woogie” Harris and his wife, Ada.

Focusing some attention on Pittsburgh’s Black-owned barber shops shouldn’t be a hard sell or a heavy lift. They and the barbers who owned them are prevalent in the city’s histories. Some of Pittsburgh’s pioneering Black entrepreneurs and civil rights heroes were barbers. These include abolitionists John Vashon (1792-1853) and Lewis Woodson (1806-1878). And then there was Lemuel Googins (1843-1915), Pittsburgh’s first elected African American council member.

If Pittsburgh chose to embark on a creative approach to documenting and conserving its Black-owned barber shops, it might find itself in good company. Dean’s Barber shop in Portland, Oregon, was listed in the National Register of Historic Places and it has received widespread media attention, including NPR segments.

The city could even correct some mistakes embedded in earlier historic preservation work. In the 2022 National Register of Historic Places nomination for the former Harris house in Homewood, the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation wrote, “No other business locations associated with Harris … still stand.”

In a narrow interpretation of “associated,” that may be true. But, there’s a Hill District barber shop with direct ties to Woogie Harris and his Crystal Barber Shop. After Woogie Harris died in 1967, his former son-in-law Harold Slater took over the shop. Harold was one of several Slaters, including his father and brother, who cut hair in the Crystal Barber Shop — at its locations on Wylie Ave. and Centre Ave. When the Crystal Barber Shop closed, the Slaters went into business in a narrow building at the intersection of Kirkpatrick and LaPlace. The building is stil lthere and it’s still used as a barber shop.

If Abrams and her colleagues are looking for a good place to start a project to preserve things that are currently off planners’ and preservationists’ radar screens, the barber shops are out there and the clock is ticking.

© 2023 D.S. Rotenstein

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