Shadyside fixture defies neighborhood trends

Walk into the Continental Barber Shop on a Saturday morning and you’ll feel like you’ve… Walk into the Continental Barber Shop on a Saturday morning and you’ll feel like you’ve stepped back in time 30 years, or into the celluloid universe of some movie about coming of age in America.

The green Formica countertops, garishly styled to look like unnaturally perfect pieces of Italian marble, are stacked with glass canisters of Barbicide and an assortment of gleaming stainless steel implements. Two black swivel chairs sit nearby.

Light classical music on the radio floats beneath the sound of electric clippers and the shuffling of the barbers’ feet.

Vincent Iannuzzi works quietly about the head and neck of a customer: clipping, brushing, shaving. He is as well-dressed a barber as you will ever meet. His silk vest, patterned in small red checks and gold accents, stays clean along with his black slacks as he dodges the tufts of hair that fall between his arms. His matching tie is smartly knotted just below his Adam’s Apple and puffs out slightly before it tucks into the vest.

Vince chuckles when he talks about how long he’s been in this business, just like he chuckles when he talks about most things related to his life or his career. In 1959, Vince was 15 and newly emigrated from Calabria, Italy. Five years later he came to work for a man named Bruno at the Continental on Walnut Street in Shadyside – back then the shop was on an upper floor of the building that now houses a J. Crew.

Vince is not romantic about his profession; he talks about it in a way that sounds like a gripe, but when you look at his face and listen to the tone of his voice – reverent, humble – you know that he doesn’t mean it.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he says of his career choice. “But I had no passion to become a barber.”

Ask him why his shop is always fully booked on Saturdays or why his clientele is counted by the generation and he says simply, “Because I’m good,” then he chuckles again and turns quickly to his work.

Longtime coworker Norma Adams has worked with Vince for about 30 years. One regular customer, Jonathan, a middle-aged attorney from Squirrel Hill, calls them “the barbershop version of The Honeymooners.”

“We’ve worked together longer than any of my three husbands combined,” Norma says. Her accent is pure Pittsburgh.

The shop is men only and, despite the mixed company of Norma, Vince keeps the new issue of Playboy on the rack by the door with the newspaper and Sports Illustrated.

Jonathan, now sitting in Norma’s chair, tells a story he thinks epitomizes the “family atmosphere” of the shop as she begins to work.

A father and son were in the shop one day, he says. The father was in Vince’s chair in the middle of a cut and the son, about 8 or 9, was sitting directly across from him in one of the waiting chairs. Jonathan was, as he is now, in Norma’s chair.

The boy was reading an Elmo book when in walks a large man wearing a shirt that identifies him as a plumber. The plumber picks up the Playboy, sits down next to the boy and begins to peruse it.

The father’s face, Jonathan says, was priceless. But the boy was oblivious and never even glanced over at the plumber’s reading material.

Norma, Vince and Paul Levine, the client in his chair at the moment, all laugh as though they’ve heard the story before.

“The scene just said ‘America’ to me,” Jonathan remarks.

“Yeah, just like a Norman Rockwell painting,” Paul says sarcastically, “kid with an Elmo book and a plumber with a Playboy.”

But Jonathan is serious; this is a family place. He’s been coming here for 14 years, and ever since his son was old enough for the experience, he’s come here, too.

Vince says that’s the way it is with a lot of his customers. He’s cut the hair of four generations in some cases. Some have been coming to him for more than 40 years, and some of them came to Bruno before Vince was around.

“Quite a few of them have gone to the big barber shop in the sky,” Vince says of the old-timers.

Jonathan says the Continental is “the real deal,” but it’s hard to know what he means by that.

Is it the best haircut? Is it Vince himself? The atmosphere on a Saturday, maybe?

Joe Colaneri, a 52-year-old career entrepreneur who currently runs a hot dog cart on Walnut in front of the United Colors of Benneton, walks into the shop and waits for his turn with Vince.

He says he’s been here four or five times and that he likes the idea of supporting a small business in an area where chain stores and name brands are moving in.

“I like the people who run it,” he says. “It’s more conducive to my personality,” meaning, as Joe puts it, “more low-key.”

Joe adds, in a voice that smacks of lessons learned, “It’s not all fun and games owning your own business.”

To which Vince replies, “Yeah, we don’t all get bailed out by the government, we have to produce and pay the bills.”

Some comments about Bear-Stearns and J.P. Morgan emerge, but quickly simmer. Discussion of politics, while not prohibited, is discouraged, Vince says.

Vince and the gang don’t have much to say about the neighborhood or how it’s changed in the last 40 years.

The Continental is now in its fourth location on Copeland Street just off Walnut, but all the shops have been within a three-block area.

Hip stores like Apple and bars like the Alto Lounge that feature a dozen different specialty martinis are what seem to define the neighborhood today.

The Continental seems out of place, a relic, a curious leftover. Like someone forgot to tell Vince and Norma and all the regulars that this kind of place was supposed to be closed years ago.

But Norma says, “For as much as it’s changed, it’s stayed the same.”

Shadyside, they say, was always more of a young, moneyed crowd. There are fewer independently owned businesses on the street, but as far as they’re concerned, things are just about the same as they’ve always been.

People come in from word of mouth, they say. There are the old regulars that Vince mostly handles, then there are the younger guys who might be in college or just starting a job – Norma usually gets them.

When Jonathan is finished and has left, a young guy comes in and sits in Norma’s chair. He’s a lawyer and he says tomorrow is his first day in court and he has to get cleaned up.

Norma says something about not getting the butterflies and they laugh as she buttons the cape around his neck.

When asked about how much thought he’s given to retirement, Vince chuckles in his normal way and then cracks another one of his ironic, self-deprecating jokes.

“Retirement? I’ve thought about retirement since the day I started this,” he says.

His predecessor, Bruno, turned the business over to Vince in 1971 and went back to Italy. “He was a smart barber,” Vince says.

He continues, joking again, “Nah, I’ll probably clip until I drop, but I’d rather drop on the tennis court.”

Seriously though, any idea when you’ll hang ’em up?

Norma chimes in, “Well, he hasn’t won the Powerball, let’s say.”

“I’ll probably be doing this for a while longer,” Vince admits.

He’s reluctant to talk about his family or his children; he only says they’re not interested in taking over the business.

He says the Continental will probably become a coffee shop when he’s gone.

“The work itself isn’t hard. As you get older it’s not that easy to stand up all day.”