How a Harvard Square barber is trying to preserve the old-school barbershop experience amid the ‘new normal’
George Papalimberis has been a Cambridge-based barber for 42 years. Now, he hopes he can maintain business during the coronavirus pandemic.
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On any regular day, La Flamme Barber Shop in Harvard Square would be full of people chatting and howling with laughter as they got a fresh new cut.
George Papalimberis, the owner, said his shop has become a meeting ground over the years.
Having been open since 1898, he said it’s the kind of place where Harvard alumni will come back 40 years later for a flash of nostalgia, memories, and a friendly hello.
But as Papalimberis reopens La Flamme in a COVID-19 era, the old-fashioned barbershop experience has been stripped down to the bare bones — a 20 minute haircut and just five other open chairs, each spaced more than six feet apart.
As he resumed business on Tuesday, Papalimberis said nothing would look or feel quite the same as it did before, and he’s worried about the transition.
“But like they say, we have to go through this,” he said.
Under the state’s new safety standards, barbers are required to clean their chairs and tools after each customer, causing a time delay between appointments. While sanitizing their tools was routine before the pandemic, Papalimberis said they’ll be paying extra attention to it now.
And to keep everyone employed, he said he’ll be rotating barbers every day.
“Hopefully we start making enough to pay my barbers and pay the rent,” he said. “It’s gonna be hard, it’s not gonna be easy, but we have to put up and stay healthy and try to keep everybody else healthy, and that’s all we can do.”
Though the trickiest piece of these new regulations, Papalimberis said, is having to require appointments.
“Walk-ins was my business,” he said, adding that over the years, plenty of well-known faces have stopped through.
Former President Barack Obama, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, former Massachusetts governors Mike Dukakis and William Weld, Senator Ted Cruz, and former 2020 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg have all gotten a cut at La Flamme on a walk-in basis, Papalimberis said.
In the summer, he relies on students living in the area and Harvard Square’s tourism to draw people to the shop, but now he’s turning to those regulars that he considers family after working in Cambridge for 42 years.
Besides La Flamme, Papalimberis owns Custom Barber Shop on Brattle Street, The Avenue Barber Shop in Lexington, and La Flamme Barber Shop in Lexington Center, where only two barbers can work each day.
“Only two barbers can not do the job of three barbers, or four barbers,” Papalimberis said. “And now they need to spend more time for each haircut.”
He said he’s worried about how much business his other shops will be able to drum up during this pandemic.
“Hopefully in the future, we’ll recover,” he said.
And at 85 years old, the one thing Papalimberis said he hasn’t quite figured out is how often he’ll be running his Harvard Square shop in-person.
“I’m old,” he said. “I’m very cautious of how I’m gonna start or if I should work there right now.”
Papalimberis said he may be staying home in Winchester for a while longer, where he’s tended to his garden, growing green beans, eggplants, and squash, among other veggies, as a pastime.
“My family, they don’t like me to go back there,” he said. “I have a son, he’s a doctor, he keeps screaming at me not to go back.”
But he said so much of his life is built into La Flamme, and he loves his customers.
“Hopefully I have the patience to go through this,” Papalimberis said.
And having grown up in a family of eight kids in Greece, where he would get up around 4:30 a.m. to start working on his parents’ farm, he said he’s familiar with patience.
By 20 years old, after becoming an undercover police officer in Athens, Papalimberis said he learned how to manage and oversee operations, too.
It’s that background he’ll be drawing on as his shops kick back into gear.
Papalimberis said he’s unsure what the future holds for La Flamme, or any of his other locations, but he hopes that when the pandemic is over he can restore the vintage experience that comes with a trip to the barbershop.
“On an everyday basis, people meet in my shop,” he said. “It’s like the old days, everybody knows everybody and talks with everybody.
“I’m gonna try to do everything I can to keep it that way.”
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