Barbershop puts the ‘old’ in old-fashioned

Katie Cacich remembers going to a sleepover in the brick building at 134 Third Ave. SE.

“Someone rented it out for a birthday party, and I remember spending the night in that big room,” she said.

A couple decades later, she was in the building again, watching as her own children got their hair cut.

Steve LaMotte will probably hear a lot of stories like that as he settles into the new location for Steve’s Old-Fashioned Barbershop in Blooming Prairie.

“In the last three days, I’ve probably had 50 people in here already, just coming in and walking around and looking around,” he said. “They’re telling me, ‘oh, this place is beautiful,’ so that’s been really cool.”

LaMotte’s path to the 1938 Works Progress Administration (WPA) building has been a circuitous one – just like his path to being a barber.

As a young man, he worked in construction in the Twin Cities, but would return to his hometown on weekends to see friends.

One weekend, a neighbor in St. Paul got home about the same time, and invited LaMotte to go to a party with him. LaMotte was happy to meet some new people, he said, and was having a good night, when “out of the blue, this guy looks at me and says, ‘you know, you’d be a great barber.’”

It just so happened that one of those new friends owned one of the biggest barbershops in St. Paul; his mother owned the barber school.

When LaMotte was laid off from his construction job that winter, he went to barber school. More connections led him to a shop in Edina, specializing in doing kids’ haircuts.

“The barber chairs had little seatbelts on them,” he said. “So I started working there, and I had the best time ever.”

A few years later, his boss became ill and closed the shop. LaMotte then ended up working at a military base in the area, cutting hair.

His son, Derrick LaMotte, lives in Blooming Prairie, “and he was like, ‘Dad, they really need a barbershop in Blooming Prairie,’ so when I came to town, we found that place, got that started and fixed up, and now he’s helped me get this one done.”

LaMotte first rented out a spot on Main Street, with a one-year lease that expired March 1. He saw an opportunity when the city of Blooming Prairie offered one of its buildings for sale.

LaMotte bought it in November, with the hope of opening in that spot when his lease ended, but a couple of snags in the renovation of the former senior center set him back a month.

There was an issue with the water meter, a roof leak, electrical issues and more.

The meter worried him, something he shared with a customer one day – who just happened to be a former plumber in town.

With that help, and the help of his sons, the work moved ahead. As he tore out sheetrock to check for other issues, LaMotte discovered there was no insulation.

“So I re-insulated, re-sheetrocked – and I haven’t done this for, like, 30 years,” he said. “I was in here late nights with a jack, just doing it all myself.”

His barber chair sits in the former kitchen of the building, which has had many iterations since it was built, including use for Just For Kix dancers and for Meals on Wheels.

“It had linoleum that was all peeling up, so I was going to buy new linoleum for the floor,” LaMotte said. “After I tore it all up, it had the original wood floors.”

There was a dishwasher near the window, which had rotted the wood floor beneath it, “so I found a place up in the Cities that had the exact same flooring; he had pulled it out of an old building,” LaMotte said.

Derrick pieced in the new flooring, then Steve took over. He rented a drum sander, which didn’t work properly.

“I couldn’t get it to tighten up right, so I had a little five-inch hand sander, and I sanded the whole floor by hand,” he said.

That was March 21, “and I’m thinking, I gotta be open in a week. I gotta get this done.”

That day, he worked until noon at his former location, then came to his new shop and sanded until 6 in the morning.

“I wanted to get it done, you know?” LaMotte said. “I feel really good, because I’ve never done anything like this before, but everybody I talked to said it turned out phenomenal. I like the older building; I like the nostalgia around it.

“It’s an old-fashioned barbershop, so that’s why I wanted to keep it to the original state, as much as I can,” he said.

The large main room, he believes, also has the original wood floor under the existing tile.

The drop ceiling, too, will be a thing of the past; he hopes to install copper ceiling tiles in the large space.

LaMotte said he’d like to add a laundromat at one end of the large main room, but for now, he’s staying busy.

“It’s taken a little time, but it’s been working out really good,” he said. “On Tuesday and Wednesday, I didn’t put my clippers down all day.”