In a two-chair barbershop in Clairton, Roger Mount shapes clients’ beards and hairlines. He does what he calls old school barbering, using a straight razor. “When you’re cutting hair like this it’s like an art, you try to make the bad look good,” he said while working on a client last week.
He’s been at the Clairton shop, across the street from the nation’s largest coke works, for two years and business has been okay, but he said it’s mostly because clients followed him from his previous shop, in Pittsburgh. The town makes it hard to run a business, he said, pointing to high taxes and operating costs, like sewage fees, for little in return. As he talked about Clairton, he seemed ready to take a straight blade to the city, too. “It’s a dilapidated, old town that needs revitalized.”
Read the full version of this reportat Keystone Crossroads' website. Keystone Crossroads is a new statewide public media initiative reporting on the challenges facing Pennsylvania's cities. WPSU is a participating station.
