Lowering Ears for 50 Years

In order to prepare to get a job in America in the 1950s, a famer’s son in San Valentino Torio, Italy started to work at a small barbershop.

At first, the 13-year-old boy didn’t cut hair, but he “watched, looked and swept hair off the floor,” said Joseph Volpicelli, the owner of on Seventh Avenue, who has been a barber at the same shop for 50 years this month. “Little by little, my father was brave enough to let me give him a haircut.” 

On Thursday, Borough President Marty Markowitz awarded Volpicelli, 71, a proclamation to honor his half-century of service in Park Slope.

Volpicelli’s father brought him and his family, Joseph, his mother and his three sisters, to Staten Island in 1956. Volpicelli attended school in the morning and worked as an apprentice at night in a barbershop on Jersey Street.

They moved to Boro Park in 1957 and Volpicelli cut hair on Fifth Avenue and 49th Street for four years. When he needed to get his barber's license, Volpicelli brought his father to the test in Manhattan and gave him a haircut, a shave, shampoo and a facial massage.

Then in 1961, the shop closed and he needed to get a new job. He went a Mr. Nardillo, who had an agency near Willoughby Street, and he told him to go work at a salon on Seventh Avenue, between President and Union streets.

He worked there until the owner retired and he took over the shop on January 8, 1968. 

“Now here we are, still cutting hair,” Volpicelli said while standing over a customer sitting in the first chair of his shop, scissors poised above the man’s head.

Volpicelli, who lives in Sheepshead Bay, peered over his big glasses and remembered how much Park Slope has changed since he first started working here.

“It was a totally different neighborhood, it was old and run down,” he said. “Then in the 1980s young people from Manhattan started to move here and the kids who left Park Slope in the 60s started to come back. Now it’s a young neighborhood.”

Volpicelli said that he gives 10 to 12 haircuts a day, a number that used to be much higher.

“Now that I am 71, I let the young people work. I am trying to take it easy,” he said with a laugh as a customer came up to him and asked him for an autograph in jest. “I still love it though.”

Bill Walsh, 66, has been coming to Joseph’s since he moved to Park Slope in 1978.  

“Joseph was here when I moved into the neighborhood. At that time he had employed the man who cut my hair as a kid in Belle Harbor, Queens: Tony the Barber,” Walsh said as Volpicelli snipped away with precise and careful snapping of his shears. “There was Tony, a block away from where we lived. When he retired, Joseph was kind enough to take me on. Since then, I’ve here every week getting my hair cut.”

“His salon is so down to earth and unpretentious. It may not appeal to everyone, but those of us who come here feel as though we are not everyone,” Walsh explained. “Joseph knows all our names and he is a humble, wonderful guy.” 

Volpicelli has cut former Mayor David Dinkins hair and United States Senator Charles Schumer has been known to come in for a cut, too.

He also said he has seen children grow up into adults from his shop, and some who have moved away still come back to the neighborhood to see their barber.

“It’s been like a family affair, that’s why I am still here. I love it,” Volpicelli said. “Park Slope is the greatest neighborhood. I am glad it came back from the old days; it’s a safer neighborhood than it used to be. Now it’s the place people want to be.”