A year ago, Rudy Milian felt that he was doing the same thing day after day. He often got to work early and stayed into the night, ducking out only briefly, if he could, to grab lunch. And he was not allowed to grow a beard.
But Mr. Milian wasn’t a junior Wall Street worker. He just served Wall Street workers.
Early last year, Mr. Milian became one of the three barbers at Salvatore’s, a shop that caters to Goldman Sachs employees in the atrium of the Conrad Hotel, next to the bank’s global headquarters at 200 West Street in Battery Park City.
By his account, all of his clients, junior employees at the bank, would ask for haircuts that didn’t look like haircuts so no one would realize they had left the office. They rarely requested shaves, and when they did, Mr. Milian said, it was always before the opening bell, a sure sign that they had stayed at the office through the night. And forget about after-shave.
He said he started hearing buzz about a new barbershop that had opened in SoHo, where he thought he could be more creative. He left Salvatore’s in December and can now be found at Harry’s, a light-filled, two-chair shop born from an Internet shaving start-up founded by two friends. The 300-square-foot space, at the southeast corner of West Houston and MacDougal Streets, harkens back to the barbershops of times past, when barbers provided straight-razor neck shaves that included hot towels.
“When it came to Goldman, I was a soldier,†Mr. Milian said over a snack of chips and guacamole at a small restaurant down the block from Harry’s. “I was there to cut hair and serve them.†Now, he said, “I’m happy.â€
To hear Mr. Milian, 43, compare his year as a Goldman Sachs barber with his new life at Harry’s, in some ways, much like listening to a former Goldman junior banker talk about his work before he joined a start-up or went to business school.
With Goldman, Mr. Milian said, he gave at least 20 haircuts a day, mostly to junior bankers, all the same style (“A little off the ears, a little of the back,†he said.), sometimes working from 8 in the morning until 8 at night. It was a mind-numbing routine for a barber who, when he worked at a combination barbershop and dance club in Miami Beach, once took care of celebrities like Jay-Z and Shaquille O’Neal.
When he moved to Wall Street, Mr. Milian said he often felt overqualified and his services undervalued. And perhaps he is right. Mr. Milian started cutting hair in 1985 when he was 15, working in the hallway of a building on Carpenter Avenue in the Bronx. At one point, he opened two sports-themed barbershops in the Bronx, where his clients included members of the New York Yankees.
When he moved to Salvatore’s in 2013, he was the youngest of the three barbers there, assigned to work only with the younger Goldman clients. Salvatore Anzalone, the man behind the barbershop, trims the hair of the more senior employees, including Goldman’s chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein.
Goldman employees used to come to Mr. Anzalone’s shop in the basement of the building in Lower Manhattan that housed the firm’s trading floor. When the bank moved to its current location in Battery Park City, Mr. Anzalone moved with it, opening a location in the Conrad Hotel next door.
Technically, the shop is open to everyone, but its customers are almost exclusively Goldman employees. Mr. Milian insisted that a non-Goldman employee would not even be able to find the shop. (It is, however, listed as one of the Conrad’s services and amenities on the hotel’s website.)
While he may have done the same haircut over and over, he said that cutting hair was not easy at Salvatore’s. Customers would often jerk their heads to watch the television, which they insisted be tuned to Bloomberg TV. Mr. Milian said he feared that they would mess up their cuts with their constant head tilts, so he would spin their chairs around to face the screen.
Chatter was mostly between the customers and mostly about the financial news they were watching, including one furious discussion Mr. Milian recalled about Buffalo Wild Wings, a public company that owns a chain of restaurants and sports bars. When they did talk to Mr. Milian, it was usually about why they were losing their hair.
“I didn’t want to do 10-minute haircuts,†said Mr. Milian, who has a tattoo of straight-razor blades on his left forearm. “I wanted to make something.â€
He now wears vests instead of suspenders, a mustache instead of a stiff upper lip. He gives two or three straight-blade shaves a day, using a soft white towel with an “H†embroidered in the corner.
Most important, he said, he feels like he is part of something rather than just a cog in a machine. At Harry’s, he can express himself. And now, he said, he can even grow a beard.
