As The Village Sun reported, “According to a source close to the project, D.O.T. (“All sorts of conspiracy theories were floated” during its repair trip to Connecticut in 2005, the city’s then–parks commissioner told the New York Times.) And now it’s unclear when the poor cube will spin again. (It also gets an annual lubing.) The cube was returned fresh and clean in 2016, gently dropped off like a baby carried by a stork:Ī beautiful sight!! Welcome home!! /m58hFOnx27- Astor Place NYC November 1, 2016Įvery time the cube disappears from the neighborhood, people miss it. (When it returned, people complained that it didn’t spin the way it used to.) In 2014, as the plaza underwent renovations, the cube was removed again for repairs - filling in dents, fixing corrosion, and servicing the pivoting mechanism. In the decades since the cube was installed, the 1,800-pound sculpture has been in a routine cycle of maintenance: It was restored in 1987 and again in 2005, when it was sent to Connecticut to be reworked by Versteeg Art Fabricators. “I did not realize that the turning was such a factor in people’s enjoyment of it,” Rosenthal said. As Rosenthal told New York in 2005, “I actually thought we would put it on this post and we’d turn it to the position we wanted it and then stick it like that.” But the sculpture was never bolted in place. The cube was meant to be temporary when it was first installed in 1967 (as part of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs Sculpture and the Environment program), but neighbors loved it and successfully petitioned to make it permanent. However, the spinning mechanism is still not working, and the support brackets remain in place. The cube is free! The Alamo on Astor Place had been behind barricades since late last year. Earlier this week, the barriers came down but the brace remains. Local news site EV Grieve noticed in December that barricades had been erected around the cube, and a steel prop was installed in April - apparently because the cube’s spinning mechanism needed repairs. As The Village Sun reported Wednesday morning, Tony Rosenthal’s Alamo sculpture is wrapped in a metal brace.

“Anywhere there was an outlet we put a little shelf, mirror and a barber chair,” Vezza recalls, “it was so busy, at one point we had 118 haircutters working all day long”.The Astor Place Cube, which has spent more than half a century being spun by drunk NYU students and curious tourists, is now locked in place. We even had a guy with a tuxedo and a megaphone outside, and the crowds were getting bigger and bigger.” To keep up with the demand, Astor Place expanded into the large basement, where it remains today. “We had lines out the door, and my father, who was in his late 50s at the time, would be taking names at the door with a clipboard. In the 1980s Astor Place’s popularity surged, a mixture of press interest, celebrity clientele and word-of-mouth cementing its reputation as a much-loved New York institution. “In the 70s, long hair and rock ‘n’ roll were the enemy of the barber,” he chuckles, “but then in the 80s along came disco and punk, and all of a sudden getting your hair cut was ok again”.

Vezza jokes that, over the decades, the shop has been at the mercy of the ebbs and flows of New York’s ever-changing fashion trends, with each era presenting its own unique challenges. “It’s changed tremendously, back then it was all warehouses, very little retail, no nightlife to speak of… it was a struggle here for a while.”Īstor Place started out as a modest, 5-seat barbershop in 1947. Astor Place is a one-block street in NoHo/East Village, in the lower part of the New York City borough of Manhattan.It runs from Broadway in the west (just below East 8th Street) to Lafayette Street.The street encompasses two plazas at the intersection with Cooper Square, Lafayette Street, Fourth Avenue, and Eighth Street Alamo Plaza and Astor Place Station Plaza. However, he explains, it was a very different neighbourhood when Astor Place first opened its doors in the late 1940s. Vezza attributes it in part to the shop’s prime location in the heart of Manhattan’s East Village. We spoke to John Vezza, Astor Place’s third-generation owner, to shed some light on Astor Place’s enduring popularity.

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