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Greg Ruggeri’s salon inhabits the front room of an apartment on the second floor of a walk-up on 18th  Street. The back room houses the office of his partner, decorator Craig Longhurst, who did all the work on the space. Ruggeri plays multiple roles: owner, assistant, and stylist. After welcoming you and washing your hair with Evo shampoo, Ruggeri will sit you down on a chair in front of a black-framed mirror and leave you to relax as he goes to work with the soothing croons of Frank Sinatra playing in the background. He specializes in cutting, tone-on-tone highlighting, natural blonde highlighting, blowouts, and updos, the latter of which he learned from his mother, a hairdresser in the sixties who taught him the art of putting hair up. Ruggeri is also known for what is best described as hair ER, i.e. fixing bad highlights. The trained colorist has opened his salon for a desperate client at 10 p.m., working until 1 a.m. to repair a botched dye job. — Sally Holmes

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