TRI-BORO BARBER SCHOOL
264 Bowery between East Houston and Prince Streets
OCTOBER 24, 1935. ABBOTT FILE 24

Tri-Boro Barber School, variant image

When project researcher Sally Sands returned to the site of the Tri-boro Barber School two years after Abbott photographed it, she found the school closed and replaced by the Gotham Sheet Metal Works. Undeterred, Sands located a similar establishment, the Tri-City Barber School at 206 Bowery, and gleaned a mass of information from its owner, Anthony Casabona. The Bowery was filled with barber schools, as many as two per block. Upon completion of a ten-week course, a student was "a full-fledged professional barber, and [could] obtain employment as such anywhere" at a union wage of $22.50 a week.

On the three floors above the Tri-boro Barber School was the Hotel Nassau, which rented rooms for 35 cents per night. Many of the barber schools' students were Bowery lodgers. Abbott's photograph compares a young, white-coated student inside the school with an older, shabbily dressed man leaning in the doorway. A variant image contrasts these figures more emphatically.

Abbott photographed the Tri-boro Barber School on the same day as the Blossom Restaurant four blocks south at 103 Bowery. The subjects are remarkably similar: Jimmy's barber shop is in the basement of 103 Bowery, and the Boston Hotel occupies the floors above the restaurant. For both, Abbott stood close-up at a slight angle to the shopfront, filling the frame with the patterns made by the lettered plateglass and barber stripes. Both contain muted human dramas, but the strong sunlight on the barber school facade is this photograph's most potent actor. Filtered through the overhead fire escape, the sun forms stripes of light and shadow over the barber stripes, which frame window and doorway.

Today both buildings, like so many others on the Bowery, are occupied by restaurant supply wholesalers.

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