Hair stylist Anthony phasing out

TROY — After nearly four decades of cutting hair in his Fourth Street salon downtown, Anthony Solomon’s run is coming to an end.

Solomon will close up shop at Anthony’s Phase I Hair Salon at the end of January and go into retirement. The building at 118 Fourth St. that houses the decorative salon, which he has owned since 1971, has been sold. 

“It’s been wonderful,” said Solomon, 67, who first began cutting hair aboard a Navy ship when he was still a teenager. “I’ve got a wonderful clientele which are, of course, my friends over the years.”

He started making those friends even before he opened Phase I, back when he used to cut hair at the Grand Street Barber Shop before the city’s urban renewal projects forced it to relocate to Fifth Avenue.

“But then urban renewal took that building, so I moved to this one,” Solomon said in his salon.

He points to the decorations and eccentricities that fill the business, which is not a tile-floored, brightly lit clinical affair but instead one of carpet, brick walls, antique decorations and furniture. While he said he has sold much of what once decorated the shop in advance of the closing, a coin-operated scale still remains — “it was a penny back then,” he said — along with an old sewing machine and the requisite barber’s pole, among other decorations.

“I wanted to make it like home for people,” he said. “I had the windows full. Thirty-nine years, you acquire a lot.”

At one time Solomon had a second salon in Albany and employed 14 people between the two. But now it’s just Solomon himself manning the Fourth Street salon, situated on a block that’s seen many things come and go over the years.

Likewise, he’s seen styles come and go as well. Solomon remembers the 1960s, when barbers used to hang signs out front advising an escalating number of long-haired men to seek hair cuts elsewhere. But not Solomon.

“Most of the barbers didn’t want to do it. They said ‘no hippie hair-dos,’” he said. “We were innovative stylists and styled the hair to what they wanted. If they wanted hair half-way down their back, we styled it.”

Solomon has been a minister for more than two decades in Duanesburg, where the South Troy native has lived since the mid-1980s. He likes country living, and plans to pursue his hunting and fishing hobbies in his retirement.

He will also continue to hold services at Duanesburg-Florida Baptist Church, where he also helps out with the soup kitchen and other community services.

“I won’t just be sitting around,” he said.

Solomon has not yet cut his last head of hair, and he might not have by the end of January, either. Some of his clients — a handful of whom he’s had as customers for 40 years — have asked him if he’d make a home visit every now and then for a haircut. 

“I might be doing that,” Solomon said.

His daughter Amanda has followed her dad’s trade, cutting hair at Fantastic Sam’s in Scotia. He’s proud that the profession — the only one he’s ever had — has entered a second generation.

“I used to bring her here when she was a baby,” Solomon said. “She’s a natural at it. It’s a people business. You’ve got to love people.”

Dave Canfield can be reached at 270-1290 or by e-mail at dcanfield@troyrecord.com.