For 55 years, Sly's Barbershop sat on a corner of 29th and Dauphin Streets in Strawberry Mansion.
Its barbers styled generations through conks, Afros, boxes, and fades. And they once catered to the likes of Billy Paul, Nat "King" Cole, and Muhammad Ali, whose signed portrait hangs on the back wall.
But early one spring morning, as Derrick Ford, 52, approached the shop for his weekly haircut, he found it dark and empty. His longtime barber's car was nowhere in sight.
Ford called him and got the news.
In a wounded economy, the owner, Henry "Sly" Schley, 79, had fallen behind on the business' bills, and the barbershop was shuttered.
"It was painful," said Ford, a regular since he was 10. "That was a vibrant corner."
After seven months, two of Sly's veteran barbers decided it had to reopen.
Like many barbershops, Sly's was a haven. Men gathered there to debate politics, sports, and women; report community issues; share troubles and laughs; and gain counsel - all over the hum of the clippers.
The business also hired from its neighborhood.
"The neighborhood missed a spot like this," said new co-owner Ralph Jones, 52, in his mild South Carolina drawl. "All of the history makes it an institution.
"We decided we didn't want it to become another stop-and-go," he said, noting the community's abundance of take-out corner stores, "so we took it over."
Jones and his partner, Bo Wroten, brokered a lease with Schley, who prefers to remain quietly in the background. They reopened on Labor Day, Jones said, "to prove the point we are back."
Now their challenge is to regain old clients, and lure a generation of new ones.
One recent Monday morning, Jones, in a black smock and black jeff cap, sat in one of the shop's six chairs, his clippers waiting.
Wroten, 49, who earned his barber's license in prison, watched Jerry Springer, while hunched over an egg sandwich.
Around the shop, drywall awaited paint. New linoleum patched the floor. A few chairs were marked by rips.
Jones said he had found Sly's by chance.
Thirty summers ago, he came to Philadelphia to visit relatives and never left. On a friend's suggestion he attended beauty school, where he shaped a woman's Afro with such precision that the customer, Schley's daughter, told him where he could find a job.
He stayed at Sly's 20 years.
"For a while I didn't know where I was going," he said. "This is what I love to do.
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