Uncovering the Insignificant

New York City, NY, USA

By Obianozo Chukwuma
salons, beauty, workers, industry

This project attempted to uncover black beauty salons in NYC, to test the narrative that ethnic niche markets have been historically minimized.

Throughout history, within the United States, reductive language and the degendering of labor has aided in the minimization of the contributions from black female entrepreneurs and now hinders their ability to form sustainable urban livelihoods. This minimization has manifested not only through social and economic standards but also governmental classifications. In this project I sought to bring to light the involvement in black women in the labor industry.

In order to uncover this data, I first needed to understand the classification scheme used by the census. Through my research I found that Beauty Salons are categorized as ‘Personal Care’ which is found in CNS19- Other (Except Public Administration Category) according to the NACIS classification system.

The Other Services (except Public Administration) sector is comprised of establishments engaged in providing services not specifically provided for elsewhere in the classification system. Establishments in this sector are primarily engaged in activities such as equipment and machinery repairing, promoting or administering religious activities, grantmaking, advocacy, and providing drycleaning and laundry services, personal care services, death care services, pet care services, photofinishing services, temporary parking services, and dating services. Private households that engage in employing workers on or about the premises in activities primarily concerned with the operation of the household are included in this sector (U.S. Census Bureau).

Once the data was located, I attempted to do a comparative map that showed the % of “Other” industry workers out of all industry workers in the city.

The first map I completed was an attempt to map the number of workers who participated in the beauty industry. After mapping the 2017 data I found it interesting to juxtapose it with 2002 because from 1995-2004 the city underwent mass investment and development that kickstarted the increase in chain stores in Upper Manhattan as well as other parts of the city. This comparison lead to the map below which measures the overall change in workers who were employed by the “Other – (Except Public Administration)” Industry from 2002 to 2017.

What is interesting in this map is that is shows an overall increase in participation in the “Other” industry in Manhattan particularly Midtown and Lower Manhattan, but a general decrease in the remainder of the city. One hypothesis for the increase could be due to the fact that New York Cities Central Business District (CBD) is the largest in the world and occupies the majority of midtown and lower Manhattan, containing more than 500 million square feet of commercial real estate and several residential neighborhoods. Midtown Manhattan commands the world’s highest retail rents, with average annual rents at US$3,000 per square foot ($32,000/m2) in 2017, so this is an area in which industry growth is expected, especially over a 15 year span (New York Times, 2017).

To better understand the decrease seen in the majority of NYC outside of the CBD, I decided that I would need to focus in on one particular neighborhood but I wanted to do so after uncovering which area had the largest amount of participation in the beauty industry, specifically where it concerns black beauty salons to focus in on the original purpose of the analysis. Since I was hitting multiple dead-ends with publicly sourced data I decided to take a more grassroots approach.

When you arrive to a new city and are in search of a salon one of the first things you do is google. So, in google I typed in “black beauty salon”. I then gathered the information for the first 100 salons (after vetting, about 91 were legitimate) and geocoded the results.

Here you can see that the majority of black beauty salons are based in upper Manhattan which is not surprising when looking at the demographic map below.

For simplicity sake I then zoomed into Harlem, specifically the 125th street corridor which was the center of the commercial district in Harlem, making it a probable place for any successful business to want to locate. Additionally, 125th historically was occupied by many “Mom and Pop” shops so it is a good place to analyze the changing commercial landscape. This resulted in the final map below.

This map shows some very interesting observations.

  1. Along the main drag there are only four hair salons. Of the four, one is an international Brand (Beleza), which has a robust first floor retail presence. The other three however, are individually owned salons which have managed to survive the robust increase in chain stores along 125th street but have clearly been minimized in their street presence. As you can see, they are 2nd floor units with little to no front signage.
  2. This map inherently displays the importance of informal networks as well as search engines like google and yelp for increasing business visibility.
  3. Digital visibility is clearly important to business success which could be a reason smaller mom and pop shops are struggling to compete with big box retailers and chain stores. While the salons above were able to secure a spot in the top 100 salons, there were over 400 results that appeared. Meaning that many other salons are being hidden simply because of their minimal internet presence. Digital marketing is lucrative and therefore expensive, limiting those who are able to invest properly to grow their digital footprint.

In conclusion this map really does illustrate the changing landscape from the once central corridor to Harlem’s economy to simply a spatially situated shopping center with no real unique cultural authenticity. Many of the stores offered along the strip can easily be found online and operate very differently than in the informal business sector.

Below are examples of changes that have occurred along the corridor sometime in the last decade.

Note: At Zoom 18 you will be able to see the previous storefronts.