Life at a Slow Clip : 50 Years After Barber Started Cutting Hair in a Chinatown Shop, Business Is Winding Down

For nearly 50 years, Tapia Remigio has sat or snipped hair in the worn barber’s chair closest to the front window of his dimly lit shop on Hill Street in Chinatown. It is the only chair he will use.

Back when Chinatown was booming and a haircut cost $2 ($4 with a shampoo), there were three other barbers at the New China Town Barber Shop and they cut hair from dawn to dusk seven days a week. All that remains now is the shop’s heart and soul, Remigio.

Remy, as his friends call him, spends most days sitting in the old chair flipping through the newspaper or watching television. On a good day, two or three customers come in search of a trim. Most of his regulars are gone.

“The old customers have died,” he said. “But their kids keep coming in.”

He figures he was born somewhere around 1920 in East Los Angeles after his parents left Mexico. Reared by his grandparents, he played with the other children in his Boyle Heights neighborhood, most of whom were Jewish.

“I learned to speak Jewish (Yiddish) by hanging out with them,” he said, twirling his round brown glasses.

The lessons helped when he was drafted into the Army for World War II. “When I went to Europe, the Jews there were surprised that I could communicate with them.”

In the late 1930s before he became a barber, Remy hung with the pachucos, the hip young Latino men who sported zoot suits and hung out at Hollenbeck Park. Often, government officials would come to the park and offer the out-of-work men a chance to travel to the mountains and work for the federal Civilian Conservation Corps, putting out fires and earning a little cash.

“They basically gave us enough money to buy cigarettes,” he said. “The rest of the money we sent back home to our families.”

His shop is a museum, with one of those clanky cash registers with dollar amounts written on the keys. It still springs open. The same dusty clock that was there when he walked in and asked former owner Gene Cosca for a job in 1945 still ticks on the wall in the back of the shop. Even his vintage black-and-white RCA Victor TV works if he struggles with it a little bit.

Remy remembers Prohibition, when the only place to get alcohol was from illegal suppliers. If the police were conducting a bust, the alcohol smugglers would break the containers and send wine pouring through the streets, leaving the streets smelling sweet but sticky.

His two children live in Pomona and visit frequently to check up on him or give updates on his grandchildren.

He has no desire to retire. He enjoys his independence and his comfortable apartment in an Eastside senior citizens complex.

“I work here so that I won’t have to stay home and do nothing,” he said with a smile, showing his original set of pearly whites. “Too many old people just sit home, they die that way.”

His one pet peeve nowadays is when ornery children hop into the barber’s chair. “I really don’t like to cut little kids’ hair. They get too excited and since I am older now, I get a little nervous,” he said.

The gangly man, whose only major health ailment was a hernia during the war, is up each day by 7 and commutes to work in his “baby,” a clean gray 1977 Oldsmobile. He lives the straight and narrow with one exception: “I’m supposed to wear my glasses when I drive, but I never do.”

He is optimistic about the future.

“In two years people say that Chinatown will be revitalized again. I hope I will be here.”