In A New Chair, Haircuts Come With Hope

Shamon Antrum left Shawnte Swint’s chair with a Mohawk fade — and a glimpse of a younger man who might follow in his footsteps.

Antrum received the haircut in a just-opened renovated barber shop called Double Kutz. With shiny parquet floors and spiffy interior, not to mention talk of lives that overcome adversity, the spot brings a touch of entrepreneurial optimism to a tough stretch of Dixwell near Pond Street.

The modest shop sits a half-dozen storefronts, several of them boarded up, north of Crown Fried Chicken. There ​“Tuggy” Brown was shot and killed in January, the first New Haven homicide of 2011.

“We used to cut Tug’s hair,” said Double Kutz’s owner, Richard Rose, as customers and well-wishers dropped in and out to admire the rehab. The place sparkles with new mirrors and an array of barbering tools, some trailing bright yellow cords down to their outlets below the three active barber stations.

Shawnte Swint, who’s 25, rents a chair from Rose at Double Kutz.

“Hey, it’s Newhallville,” he remarked from his perch.

Everyone knows if you hang out on the corner with people who have guns, you’re going to end in a bad way, he reasoned. If, on the other hand, you learn from mistakes, take in the good examples of hard-working people around you, the outcome can be positive.

The outcome for his customer, Antrum, was positive. Antrum was a star basketball player at Hillhouse High back in the day (recently inducted in the school’s hall of fame). He played professionally in Europe; for five years he has run Camp Antrum for New Haven kids, with an emphasis on academics.

Shawnte Swint was a basketball standout, too. He also faced more than his share of adversity — and chose the positive road.

6 Foster Homes

Swint had some role models who pointed him that way — and others who didn’t.

His grandfather Willie Swint owned a private garbage and carting company in Newhallville for decades. Shawnte was to have been one of the men in the family to grow up into a job in the business, but it fell on bad times. Shawnte’s grandmother sold it when he was kid.

He lived in Newhallville until he was 10. Both of his parents used heroin. He was taken away from them before he was out of elementary school.

“Hey, my father was one of the biggest dealers in Newhallville. He did 10 years, and he’s set to do 12 more,” Swint said as he looked down the wide street in front of Double Kutz, a flicker of wistfulness about his gaze. Swint said he loves his father and stays in touch with him.

Shawnte ended up living with five difficult foster families, until he was taken into the embrace of a loving sixth foster family, Jerome and Patricia Stallings. He lived with them between his 14th and 19th years. He has a tattoo of his foster mom on his arm.

Meanwhile, Swint developed a talent: basketball. He was a star shooting guard at Wilby High School in Waterbury, where he scored 59 points, including 13 threes, in a single game. That record still stands in Connecticut, he claimed.

He landed a full scholarship to play on the Division I Hofstra University basketball team. Then an arm injury in his freshman year ended the basketball career.

And then there was Alanie. ​“I got injured, I had a baby, I became a working man,” Swint said. (Alanie’s now 6; her face stares at him from a photo tucked into the barber-shop mirror as he cuts hair.)

Swint found himself back in New Haven. He hung around barbershops such as Worthys in Newhallville and had picked up the trade. Eventually he began giving haircuts to friends and cousins who couldn’t afford a store-bought one themselves.

Eventually he rented a chair from Richard Rose, who was then a partner at a shop called Precision Cuts on Division Street at Dixwell. That was in 2008 when Rose, released from federal prison, was given a break by a friend who ran Precision Cuts.

“We hit it off,” said Rose, who’s 41. Swint ​“has a lot of potential. He needs to be around the right people.”

“We’re helping him not to go through some of the things we went through,” said Eric Anderson, a big man whose barbering station is at the back of the shop. ​“We enliven him on all aspects of life, pitfalls of life, the things that landed me in jail.” He encourages Swint to put aside ​“even $10 a day” to send to his daughter’s mother in Naugatuck.

A little over a year ago, the building housing Precision Cuts burned down. Richard Rose decided to open his own shop at 815 Dixwell. That’s where Anderson and Swint joined him. But the rent at 815 proved excessive. After a year Rose found a better deal with the landlord of 799 Dixwell. With his encouragement, Rose undertook the renovation, the first major investment he made in a business.

The work was inaugurated at the beginning of March and completed by the end of that month. Rose financed it entirely with money he had saved. The new shop got into full swing this week.

In between haircuts, Swint spoke of his own future plans.

“I want to open the first black-owned barbershop in downtown New Haven,” he said. He spoke of opening it not just to cater to African-Americans, but because ​“here in the hood you don’t meet enough different kinds of people. Doctors, lawyers.”

He added that downtown has another allure: ​“That’s where the money is.”