Struggling Neighborhood Clearly Needs Another Short-Lived Hair Salon

One man acknowledged he could tolerate a café instead of a hair or nail salon.

City Center, June 26 – Jerusalem’s main downtown business district could use one more coiffure shop that lasts maybe three months before its storefront returns to its natural for-rent status, observers concluded today.

A one-block stretch of Ben Yehuda Street beginning one block west of King George V Street sports a row of empty retail spaces, where failed or defunct business have at various points occupied the storefronts along the street’s last segment before the thoroughfare merges with Betzalel Street. Locals recalled the establishments that leased those retail spaces over recent decades: a watch repair shop, at least two hair styling parlors, a party supply and planning service, a tailor, and an art gallery, among an uncertain number of other enterprises, have closed over the last ten years alone in that single bank of storefronts. Now passers-by and frequenters of the area argue that what the place needs is another hair and beauty establishment that will shut down after at most a year, since the rare successful one just up the street, plus the series of failed ones in the same place, were not enough.

“I was thinking either another hair or nail salon, maybe both,” suggested a woman who identified herself as Pazit, looking from across the street at the four consecutive empty spaces. “I know the watch guy was old and he probably just retired, and that’s a shame – it disrupted the area’s pristine record of only hosting doomed enterprises. We need to go back to the tried and true kind of business appropriate for this stretch of stores, and that’s a beauty salon of some sort. It should probably be run by a Mizrahi man who everyone assumes is gay but isn’t, necessarily.”

“If it lasts more than four months, that’s going to be a disappointment,” she added. Six other interviewees concurred with Pazit’s sensibilities on the subject, with one man acknowledging he could tolerate a café instead of a hair or nail salon.

“Central Jerusalem doesn’t have enough of those,” he argued. “Look around. You have to go over to the next street to find one, there are only two or three there in the space of a hundred meters. Unacceptable.”

Jerusalemites did lament the closure of one business in the area, however: a tourist souvenir shop further east on Ben Yehuda that called itself Going Out Of Business, thus luring an unknown number of credulous bargain-seekers to part with some cash. It did eventually go out of business approximately 20 years ago.

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