In Woodside, a passion for barbering

Ruben Arnov has been a barber since 1985. For the last ten years, he’s owned and operated Ruben Barbershop in Woodside, Queens. His says his rent has steadily increased by about 120 dollars every year, and he has a family to support, which means he has to work on Labor Day. But he’s not upset about that.

“Another day, what are you going to do?” he asked me as we sat on a long bench behind the three barber’s chairs in his shop. “I like to work! That’s the bottom line.”

Arnov says he got his start as a barber as a child, when he would help out around his uncle’s barbershop after school. First he swept and cleaned. Then, “slowly, surely, step by step,” he learned to be a barber. Then it became a passion.

“I like to do the work in my hands, be creative,” Arnov said. “Changing the style, making people feel better, feel younger.”

He certainly made me feel good. His razor hums with expertise. It’s obvious from the first cut that he knows exactly what he’s doing when he confronts a full head of hair. There’s no violent back and forth; it’s as if he works in cooperation with the hair he’s cutting. I’ve never seen anyone make barbering look quite so easy. And as I left the shop, I told him so.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s called ‘experience.’”