Wall Street deals are on hold. Its skyscrapers are mostly hushed. But, in a subtle sign of New York City’s reopening, Franco Anzalone is finally cutting hair again.
On Monday, the 34-year-old barber rose at 5 a.m., walked into the Conrad Hotel in lower Manhattan and opened the door to his Salvatore salon for the first time in three months.
Then, the bankers came.
One top executive got his eyebrows trimmed. A young financier complained about bossy politicians. A managing director from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said it felt like the first day of school.
Neighborhood barbershops and salons across the U.S. are reopening, but none is quite like Anzalone’s. He works in the shadow of Goldman, whose headquarters towers over his Battery Park City shop. As Wall Street financiers trickle into offices again, they’re helping to breathe life back into an ecosystem of bakers, barrooms, bodegas and barbers.
Anzalone has been giving bankers haircuts for years, as did his father, Salvatore, for decades before him. The salon has a private room for pedicures, and photos over the cash register of hedge fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones and former Treasury Secretary and Goldman boss Hank Paulson. Anzalone charges about $38 for a cut, a price that shrewd traders would favor to the $1,000 trims Julien Farel gives at his salon inside the Loews Regency hotel uptown.
Tina Peiss, a Romanian-born barber, walked in and greeted Anzalone in the Italian that she learned decades ago in Bucharest. Returning to her chair here suited her better than sitting at home in Queens.
“I like to work, I don’t want to be home,” she said. “When you work, you move.”
Vin DeSantis walked in wearing a camouflage-patterned mask. He’s an executive at a nearby security company whose dogs sniff for bombs inside investment firms and sports events. While Anzalone cut his hair, a big-time banker sat down. He’s so high on Wall Street’s ladder of power and prestige that he said his very presence here, and the words he spoke while Peiss gave him a trim, were off the record. Anzalone made sure the policy was enforced.
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