Santa has arrived early at the Harris Barber Shop at 721 N. Fourth St.
 
Some employees of Coastal Construction Co. – the company building the marina development downtown – are taking time from their schedule this week to give the historic barber shop a free facelift.
 
“We’re giving it a historic feel,” said David Edmonds, who’s helping manage the project, which began early Monday morning and is projected to wind up Wednesday evening.
 
The barber shop, which has been in continuous operation since 1955 under three different owners, will have a new interior, complete with checkerboard floor, brick veneer walls and vintage sinks and chairs: a classic look that will echo the building’s late 19th-century architecture. One rear wall will display old photos, equipment and other artifacts from the shop’s early days, Edmonds said. It will also get a new name: Bigg Redd's Barber Shop, reflecting the nickname of its current owner. 

The construction company estimates that the value of the labor, supplies and fixtures used in the upfit is about $10,000.
 
“I didn’t want to make changes before because there were guys coming here that had started getting haircuts here when they were 10 or 11 years old,” said the shop’s current owner, Ulrict Little – better known as Bigg Redd. Little purchased the business in 2011 from then-owner Lawrence Freeman.
 
When Freeman and original owner Hurbert Harris, along with many early patrons, passed away, Little said he decided it was time for a revamp. And Chuck Schoninger, one of his regular customers, had an idea.
 
Schoninger, president of USA InvestCo, the company developing the northern riverfront area, asked Edmonds and Ryan Lisk, Coastal Construction’s director of construction, if they would be willing to undertake a good will project. His idea: perform the facelift at no cost, but with the understanding that little would donate half of any increase in revenues into a fund to finance another similar project in the North Fourth neighborhood.
 
“This is a pay-it-forward concept,” Schoninger said in an email. "The idea is, if [the shop's] sales increase over last year, 50 percent of the increase will go into a fund so this can be offered to another business next year."

Little said he hopes that will be the case, pointing to signs of revitalization up and down his block: the new Folks Cafe moving in to a former physician's office next to the popular Goat and Compass bar, a flower shop two doors down from him and new apartment developments right around the corner. He'd like to help some other small businesses spruce up.

"Words can't express what they [Coastal Construction] are doing for me," he said. "I have a steady customer base, but there's room for growth."