Scores of angry protesters forced the closure of a Brooklyn nail salon Monday, throwing bottles and shoes as cops escorted out the owner and a worker in the wake of a racially charged brawl between employees and customers.
The tensions were reminiscent of the black-on-Asian boycotts of nearby Brooklyn businesses of the early 1990s, which were followed by the deadly three-day riot in Crown Heights in 1991.
Nine NYPD cops stood guard Monday outside the Asian-run, 888 Happy Red Apple Nails shop as about 75 predominantly black demonstrators held hand-lettered signs saying “BLACK $$$ MATTERS” and chanted slogans including, “Shut them down!” and “No money! No toes! No nails!”
Some in the crowd then tossed the bottles, shoes and other objects when cops led the store’s male owner and a female employee to an unmarked police cruiser around 2 p.m. The pair were driven to the 67th Precinct to talk to investigators, sources said.
About an hour later, the store at 1426 Nostrand Ave. in East Flatbush was shuttered, and the remaining workers were driven away in an NYPD van.
The protest followed a violent confrontation inside the salon Friday during which three customers tussled with several workers — allegedly over a $5 eyebrow wax-gone-awry.
Surveillance and cellphone footage shows two workers whacking the customers with broomsticks, with one patron staggering toward the door as a worker rained blows on her back.
Bystander Mercy Maduka, who posted the cellphone footage online, wrote Monday on Instagram that the melee began after “the Asian lady in the blue shorts messed up the ladies eyebrow and it was completely bald.”
Salon worker Huiyue Zheng, 32, and customer Christina Thomas, 21, were busted Friday on charges including misdemeanor assault, harassment and menacing.
Zheng was identified by law-enforcement sources as the broomstick-wielding worker who chased the customer out of the store.
Instagram user @fantabby identified herself as Thomas’s mother, writing: “My Mother, daughter and her friend where attack Friday night by a gang of Asian nail technicians. Why? Because, my daughter refused to pay them for a botched 5$ eyebrow wax.
“Beside them getting hit with sticks, acetone was thrown on them,” she claimed.
In a statement, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams called the online video “deeply disturbing and unacceptable” and said he’d discussed it with both the NYPD and Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez.
A Gonzalez spokesman said, “We are in the process of examining all the evidence in this case, including videos that were not available at the time of arraignment, and will evaluate the charges accordingly.”
Tionna Smalls, 33, said she helped organize Monday’s protest because “I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the video.
“You don’t got no respect for this community, then you don’t get no money in this community. That’s it,” Smalls said.
“Shut them down, and they need to be arrested for gang assault. If that was a black salon and that happened, we all would have been locked up.”
A spokesman for Mayor de Blasio declined to comment beyond saying: “We are monitoring the situation closely. We have community liaisons on the ground.”
In January 1990, black protesters set up a picket line outside the Korean-owned Family Red Apple grocery in Flatbush — less than a mile from 888 Happy Red Apple Nails — following a scuffle between a female Haitian customer and store workers.
The boycott spread to a second Korean-owned store across the street, Church Fruits and Vegetables, based on claims that one of the workers went to hide there following the incident.
Then-Mayor David Dinkins — de Blasio’s political mentor — tried and failed to end the daily protests, which led the owner of Family Red Apple to sell the business in May 1991, saying he wanted to “get away from the zoo atmosphere that has surrounded this boycott.”
Additional reporting by Rich Calder