Shalom Sharp woke up around 3:30 a.m. Wednesday to pick up his barbers from his downtown business and start cutting hair at Los Angeles Mission in Skid Row.
By 9 a.m., he’d shaved and shaped up more than 100 heads of hair, he said.
“It feels good. I’m happy I can do this, do the right thing,” said Sharp, whose store got some unwanted attention in May when the building owner that leases to him started blasting the children’s song “Baby Shark” from their Main Street building to deter homeless people from staying in the area.
Sharp’s been cutting hair since he was 13 in New York, he said, and was looking forward to the morning trip to the shelter to give some free cuts before a host of city leaders stopped by for a Thanksgiving giveaway for Skid Row’s residents.
The event was also part of a way for him and his staff to give back in the wake of the “Baby Shark” incident, when police officials met with the landlord and told them they’d have to cut the music. Soon after, representatives from Los Angeles Mission reached out to Sharp and the landlord to discuss their concerns.
“After the incident, L.A. Mission CEO Dennis Oleesky contacted Shalom to discuss it and found that Shalom felt genuinely remorseful. He acted out of frustration and did not consider the consequences, as many of us often do,” mission spokesman Greg Mielcarz said.
Sharp said within a year or two of starting his barbershop, they’d started having issues with homeless people gathering in front of the business. The issues prompted his landlord to blast the annoying earworm of a song to bring the city’s attention to the problem, he said.
Hostile architecture and novel ways of trying to disperse homeless people have become somewhat common in L.A. in recent years. Businesses have installed planters and other noisemaking devices to make staying in front of a storefront inconvenient.
In 2019 a 7-Eleven in North Hollywood played classical music. Others put up fences and prickly shrubbery to deter loiterers.
But everyone was singing a different tune on Wednesday.
Mikey Resendez, all smiles and red converse shoes, sat down in the morning and thanked Sharp for his haircut before it was even done. The 35-year-old has been sober for a month and living at the mission, he said.
He’s a musician and had an appointment at a nearby recording studio later in the day. That’s after his first round of facial tattoo removal, Resendez said.
When an L.A. Mission social media worker walked by, Resendez offered to play “an entire album” for their website. “I have 15 songs ready to go,” he said.
Another resident who wanted a cut was Gilberto, who declined to give his last name. He sat quietly while Sharp trimmed his hair. He said it had been four or five months since he’d gotten his hair cut — not too long, he said, but still a fresh trim was a nice luxury to have.
After the cuts, mission volunteers cooked and served 2,500 meals at their Skid Row location alongside local politicians, including Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, L.A. County Sheriff Robert Luna and gubernatorial candidate and former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
Gilberto, now with a clean cut, ate a traditional Thanksgiving meal with turkey, gravy, rolls and other fixings outside the mission on a warm fall day. “It’s good,” he said.
The post After deterring homeless people with ‘Baby Shark’ song, a barber offers free Thanksgiving trims appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
