George Iliadis has been a barber and a hustler, a therapist and a friend, an actor and a chess savant. On this day, he is a little teary-eyed.
He is standing, white overcoat draped around the shoulders and gold watch dangling from the wrist, as the shop where he has spent his life is packed up piece by piece. Cutting hair has been his profession for more than 63 years and he doesn’t seem to want to let it go.
Iliadis, 84, is retiring at the end of the month and his Queen Street and Broadview Avenue shop is closing with him. Business has been down since the pandemic and he wants to spend more time with his wife. But for all his decades of haircuts and shaves, he just wants to keep on going.
It is part of him, just as he is part of the neighbourhood.
“After all these years,” he says, his voice catching, “you stop just like that, you know?”
Iliadis is nothing if not a character. He talks in the third person — “Georgie’s a famous guy,” he says of his recent retirement party, when customers and politicians packed into his shop — and he has the screen credits to prove it. He appeared in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and the 2005 Russell Crowe movie “Cinderella Man,” and is a current member of ACTRA, the actors’ union.
He loves to dance. He has a competitive streak. He plays chess with customers who stop by, and wins most of the time. When business is slow, he plays aggressively.
And Iliadis hustles. He’ll wave anyone and everyone into his shop. When asked why he’s worked so long, he says it’s so his cheques don’t bounce. He owns the building, which includes a newly-renovated unit he is trying to rent.
“I have an apartment,” he says. “You know anybody?”
George’s Barber Shop is a throwback to another age, a place where the AM radio hums and time is marked by the rumbling of streetcars past the window. Haircuts and shaves come with a massage and hot towel. The shop smells of Barbicide and shaving cream.
A pile of photos rests on the table by the door; pictures of ‘60s and ‘70s and ‘80s hairdos faded blue from decades lining the walls. In the shop’s heyday, Iliadis worked the front and his wife, Kalliopi, worked the beauty parlour in the back. Helen, their daughter, would spend her Saturdays here, where all the chairs were full and the place buzzed.
She swept the hair off the floor and fetched coffee for the ladies from the breakfast joint on the corner. “Oh my God,” Helen remembers. “The tips were so good.”
Iliadis comes from a big family — one sister, six brothers — in a small village in northern Greece. Growing up, he helped his father on the farm and went into the mountains to cut wood. His father told him he should learn a trade, because he didn’t have enough schooling to get by.
So at age 16, Iliadis moved to Kastoria, a nearby city, and learned to cut hair. In 1960, he went to work in Germany and split his time between a barbershop and fertilizer factory. In 1963, at 21 years old, he moved to Montreal, then Toronto.
He started cutting hair on Queen Street, just east of Broadview Avenue, on a property with a grocery store. One weekend, the grocery store burnt down; Iliadis took the barbershop chairs, which survived the fire, and by Monday had moved into a shop at 741 Queen Street East, one block over.
He would remain there for more than half a century, minus the couple months each summer he spent in Greece. He became an institution for customers like Morad Affifi.
Affifi, 46, has been coming to George’s once a week for 16 years for a shave. He works a hectic job in sales, but for a half-hour every week, he can decompress. “It’s cheaper than a therapist,” he said.
“That beautiful oak tree that’s sitting there? That’s what George has been for this neighbourhood,” Affifi said. “It’s like this thing, this establishment … He is the area and in a way, he is Toronto.”
Now, the clock is winding down for Iliadis. He used to work six days a week, but has since cut down his days, then his hours. Prices, once $2 for a cut and a shave, are now $40 to keep up with rising costs. Business fell off a cliff during the pandemic and has never fully recovered. The factories that once kept his shop packed have closed, replaced by condos and competition.
And his wife, who grew up in a Greek village three kilometres away from Iliadis, who retired from the shop 30 years ago and has been waiting for Iliadis ever since, is in need of a hip replacement and currently can’t walk. He can’t be in two places at once, he says.
But he also can’t quite say it’s the end. Iliadis says he keeps going because he wants the money; Helen says it’s his love of the people who walk through the door. He thinks he’ll keep doing house calls, driving over to his old friends and giving them a cut or a shave wherever they are.
“Barbering, it’s all he’s done since he was very young,” Helen says. “How do you let go of the scissors?”
