Bertram’s Barbershop on South Main Street has been cutting hair in Akron since 1987, and walking in feels less like an errand and less like a nostalgia act than you might expect. It just feels like a place that knows what it’s doing.
I went the first time because a coworker mentioned it in passing — said he’d been going there for twelve years, that the guys actually listen when you tell them what you want, and that the price hadn’t moved much in a decade. All three things turned out to be true.
The shop sits in a low brick building on the stretch of South Main that most people drive past without slowing down. There’s a red and white pole out front, a couple of chairs in the window, and a hand-lettered sign that tells you the hours. Inside, it’s four chairs, a TV usually running the local news or whatever game is on, and a waiting area with a row of seats and a stack of magazines that date, charitably, from several administrations ago. It smells like cloves and witch hazel. It is not trying to be anything other than what it is.
The barbers — Bertram himself still comes in a few days a week, though his son handles most of the scheduling now — work clean and work fast without rushing you. They’ll ask what you want, actually absorb the answer, and then get to it. If you want to talk, they’ll talk. If you want to sit quietly and watch the news, that’s fine too. I’ve had both kinds of visits and left happy both times.
A regular men’s cut runs around fourteen to sixteen dollars, which in 2024 qualifies as genuinely unusual. A shave with a straight razor is maybe five dollars more and takes about twenty minutes. I’ve had the shave twice. The second time was better than the first — I think they’d figured out my face — and it’s the kind of thing that makes you wonder why you ever started doing it yourself.
There’s no booking app, no Instagram grid of fades and lineups, no valet parking. You can call ahead or just show up and wait. Saturday mornings get busy, so I tend to go on a Thursday around ten if I can swing it. The wait on a Thursday is usually zero to one person ahead of you.
What keeps me coming back isn’t any single thing. It’s that Bertram’s is a place where the transaction is straightforward and the people doing the work take it seriously. The shop doesn’t have a lot of personality in the way that newer places perform personality — no plants, no curated playlist, no branded merchandise near the register. What it has instead is the feeling of somewhere that has outlasted trends by simply being competent and reliable for thirty-five-plus years.
South Akron doesn’t have as many of these kinds of places as it used to. Some neighborhoods have lost them entirely. The fact that Bertram’s is still here, still doing the same thing it was doing when Ronald Reagan was in office, is worth something. I think that’s worth driving a few miles for, even if you don’t live on that end of town.
Cash is preferred. Bring exact change if you can. And if Bertram himself is in, let him take you — the man has hands that have been doing this since before most of his current customers were born, and it shows.
