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The Best Barbershops in New York City

From walk-in institutions to a nearly $500 session that serves bourbon, 16 shops where the craft outlasts the trend.

Spring does something to men's hair in this city. The winter beanie comes off, the damage reveals itself, and suddenly every guy in Manhattan is staring at his reflection on the subway glass, wondering if it's time to try something new. It is. And New York, for all its failures of affordability and common sense, remains the best city in America to sit in a barber's chair, which, for the uninitiated, is a different proposition than a salon. A salon styles. A barbershop cuts. The tools are different (hot lather, straight razors, clippers), the training is different, and the loyalty between a man and his barber rivals anything you'd find in a therapist's office. 

The first great barber here was an enslaved Haitian-born man named Pierre Toussaint, who arrived in Manhattan in 1787 and became the most sought-after hairdresser among the city's elite before buying his freedom in 1807. He is the only layperson buried in the crypt beneath St. Patrick's Cathedral, and every New York barbershop since has operated on the principle Toussaint understood 200 years ago: that the chair is where craft, identity and trust converge.

By 1913, Joseph Molé opened a shop on Lexington Avenue that still operates today. What happened in the chairs across the city tracked every cultural shift that followed. The pompadour carried the postwar decades. The afro, which was a deliberate rejection of the barber's chair as much as a political statement, nearly killed the industry in the 1970s. It might have stayed dead if hip-hop hadn't revived it with the hi-top fade exploding out of Harlem and Brooklyn in the mid-1980s, which turned barbershops back into essential cultural cornerstones. That revival owed everything to Black barbershop culture, which had sustained the institution during the lean years—shops from the South Bronx to Bed-Stuy functioning as communal living rooms and political forums long before the rest of the city remembered that a good barber was worth knowing. 

The modern renaissance is, in large part, a rediscovery of something Black New Yorkers never lost. Today, the range spans from neighborhood-priced to genuinely extravagant, with excellent work at every tier. A city with this many barbershops could never be captured in a single list. There are institutions and innovators in every borough that deserve their own entries, and leaving anyone out is an occupational hazard of the format. Neighborhoods matter, but Neighborhood Barbers matter more. Here are 16 worth knowing.

The Best Barbershops in New York City

Astor Place Hairstylists

Martial Vivot Salon Pour Hommes

45 Christopher St., New York, NY 10014

Michael........

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