A hair’s-breadth apart > Belfast barbershop, salons not too close for comfort

BELFAST — If you ask Duane Warren, owner of A Cut Above, how two other barbershops came to adjoin his, he’s apt to quickly correct you.

“There’s not three barbershops on this street,” he said Saturday morning as he vigorously clipped a young client’s hair. “There’s one barbershop, one beauty salon and one combination barbershop-beauty salon.”

Such subtle distinctions are not likely to strike casual passers-by, who instead see only the shingles of three synonymous businesses on High Street, each hoping to get your head in their hands. But each shop has managed to thrive with its own faithful clientele, who come from all over Waldo County and as far away as Gardiner.

Two summers ago, Cliff’s Hairstyling Salon moved beside the storefronts that were home to A Cut Above and Kief’s Barbershop.

Ellen Springer, the owner of Cliff’s, described the move into her current location as “coming full circle.” The original owner of the business, Cliff McDonough, began in the location in the late 1950s and later moved to a second-floor shop across the street. Springer, who began working for McDonough in 1965, took over the business 11 years ago. Climbing the stairs at the second-floor shop started to become a problem for some of her older customers a few years ago, so she decided to move to ground level.

The storefront beside Kief’s was vacant, so she took it. “The storage room in back still had labels in place from the old beauty shop — bleach, hair coloring,” she said. “It had never been painted over, and that was from back in the ’50s.”

“I don’t feel we’re in competition with each other,” she said of her neighbors. “In fact, if one of us is busy, we’ve sent people down the line. Plus, if I run out of something, I can borrow it — and they can borrow things from me.”

As for the patrons she and her other two stylists cater to, Springer said, “Basically, we do everybody’s hair,” but added that flattop haircuts are not her strong suit.

But her next-door neighbor, Bill Kief — now there’s a flattop man. Before buying the barber business 18 years ago, he cut hair at the Maine Maritime Academy in Castine, and before that at Dow Air Force Base in Bangor. “I cut my teeth on flattops,” he said Saturday while parked outside the shop. Kief is recovering from surgery and won’t be back cutting hair for three or four more weeks. “I’ve seen flattops go out of style and I’ve seen them come back again,” he said. His shop has been a site for barbering for 85 years, he said.

And its interior looks the part of a traditional barber shop — three steel swivel chairs in a row beside a full-wall mirror, and the modern and not-so-modern accoutrements of shaving and shearing on the nearby counter. The place looks so much like a typical barbershop, in fact, that Mel Gibson borrowed much of the interior a few years ago to use as props in the filming of “The Man Without a Face.”

Meanwhile, next door to Kief, Warren operates a barbershop in the front half of the building and a beauty shop in back. He has cut hair for 28 years, barbering in this spot for the past 13. Saturday morning a cacophony of feminine voices and splashing water emanated from behind a half-wall divider in the shop. Up front Warren clipped amid a group of silent men sitting cross-armed and glancing about the room. His demeanor remained a constant calm, whether trimming the gray fringe of an old man’s hair or quickly lopping off the wispy blond locks of a 1-year-old writhing and screaming as though his head were being severed.

Getting a flattop haircut from Warren costs a dollar more than a regular haircut. Asked about the price discrepancy, Warren said with an ever-so-slight smile, “When I first started doing them, I didn’t like doing them — that’s why they’re more,” he said.

Warren doesn’t see anything so unusual about three hairstyling shops being located next to each other. “It just gives the tourists something to talk about as they drive by,” he said.

“Down in Rockland,” he added, “they used to have a building with one barbershop upstairs and another one downstairs. That seems stranger to me.”

There are at least five other hairstyling businesses in Belfast.

Asked about competing with two such close neighbors, Warren said, “I make a living.”

Said Kief of the customer pool: “If they’re not satisfied with one of us, they’ll try the others.”

Basically, the three shopkeepers have a harmonious relationship, Kief said. When Springer was considering the move next to Kief two years ago, she asked him how he felt about it and he said he had no problem with it, Kief said.

Still, there is at least a tiny bit of rivalry amongst the tonsorial triad. The peppermint-striped barber pole hanging in front of Kief’s door turns counterclockwise — Warren’s rotates opposite. “Mine is going in the right direction,” Kief said with a grin.