Local News
After a burst pipe devastated Matt’s Barber Shop, one customer launched a GoFundMe to help the business.
In the heart of Brighton Center, where small businesses double as community spaces and neighbors know each other by name, the water came fast and without warning.
When Matt Charette arrived at his business, Matt’s Barber Shop, just before 10 a.m. Tuesday, he expected an ordinary workday. Instead, he was met with several inches of ice on his storefront steps.
“What the hell is that?” he recalled thinking to himself. He could hear the sound of rushing water, and opened the door to a devastating sight.
Inside, he found four inches of standing water consuming the mid-century modern furniture, artwork, barber tools, and vinyl records he’d been collecting for years.
“I couldn’t even look in. Like anyone else who owns a small business, you put your heart and soul into something like that,” he said.
The cause, Charette said, was simple but costly: one of the tenants upstairs turned off his heat when he left town, and the pipes burst.
“Public service announcement,” Charette said wryly in a phone interview, “When it’s real cold out, do not turn your heat off. Because pipes will burst.”
The burst pipe sent water cascading into the 315-square-foot shop he opened in December 2018, where he works alongside two fellow barbers, Jesse Cabbage and Jake Bell.
Barbering is more than a career for the 41-year-old — it’s a lifelong craft. Charette has spent 22 years of his life barbering — about as much time barbering as he has spent in the Brighton neighborhood.
The Cape Cod native moved to Brighton in 2003 and lived there for two decades before moving to Worcester three years ago (he still makes the 42-mile commute to Brighton five days a week for work).
After discovering the flooding, he called his building manager and city officials to shut off the water, and then began the slow, grueling cleanup: pulling down ceiling insulation, draining water and ripping up the floor.
But before Charette could fully process the loss, the community he’s spent decades serving began to rally around him.
‘I care about them, and I know a lot of people care about them too.’
The barbershop operates on a walk-in basis, with customers coming and going throughout the day. One of them, “an angel of a customer,” Dietrich Warner, jumped into the fray to help.
Warner, 35, has been a dedicated regular of Matt’s for five years, he told Boston.com. He arrived for a haircut Tuesday morning to find the beloved barbershop full of water.
Inside, he said, the mood among Charette and the other barbers was crushing.
“They looked so defeated,” Warner said. He and his partner run childcare centers across the area, and said they too have experienced frozen pipes before in their small business.
“You just feel like your world’s ending when your small business has something bad like this happen,” he said. “I was planning on being here for a half hour anyway [for my haircut]. I’ll just hang around and see if I can help them.”
Standing outside the flooded shop, Warner made a suggestion: What if they started a GoFundMe?
“They were like, oh, no. Don’t do that. We don’t want to ask for handouts,” Warner recalled Matt saying.
But he couldn’t shake the feeling.
“I care about them, and I know a lot of people care about them too,” he said.
So, he started a GoFundMe and shared it in a popular Allston-Brighton Facebook group. From there, it took off.
As of Friday, Feb. 13, donations surpassed $25,800.
Charette said he didn’t even know about the fundraiser until he was told it already had $1,100 in it.
“I was pretty moved by just that small amount of money,” he said. “It’s incredibly, incredibly heartwarming. For a split second things seem so bleak, but to know that we mean a lot to the community is reassuring. It just means the world to all three of us.”
Warner believes the momentum of support from the neighborhood changed everything.
“It’s almost like they got energized by the community support, and now their goal is to just open as fast as they can again,” he said.
More than a haircut
For Warner, Matt’s isn’t just a barbershop. It’s a place where friendship and connection are found, where jokes and the latest gossip are traded just as easily as cutting shears.
“It’s not just a customer-owner relationship. You really get to know each other,” he said.
More than just a watering hole for friends to gather, the barbershop has also become something of a haven for Warner and others in the neighborhood. “It makes you feel very safe,” Warner said.
Charette has long described the shop the same way.
“I’m eternally grateful. I’ve always felt that the shop is more than just a place for people to get their hair cut. It’s a community space. It’s a safe space for anyone. It’s been a safe space for the LGBTQ+ community, people of all of all races, colors, creeds. It’s a third space,” he said.
Cleanup and community
Now, as cleanup continues, the goal is simple: “We’re just gonna build it out and put a fresh coat of paint on it and get some new tools and barber chairs and get back to work ASAP.”
A benefit show is scheduled for Feb. 19 at 8 p.m. at O’Brien’s Pub, where Charette’s band will perform alongside other local acts.
For Warner, the moment feels bigger than just one business rebuilding after disaster struck — it feels like neighbors coming together.
“I don’t know all my neighbors in Allston. And I think a lot of people don’t know a lot of their neighbors. I think that post-COVID, we’ve all kind of retreated into our little bubbles … And this is one of those moments where it feels like there’s actually a community.”
As water is pumped out and floors are replaced, what remains intact is something harder to damage: a neighborhood’s sense of itself — and its willingness to show up when one of its own needs help.
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