Chicago's Jewelers Row: The Midwest's Diamond Block

Chicago's Jewelers Row is a short stretch of Wabash Avenue in the Loop — chiefly the blocks between Washington and Monroe Streets, in the shadow of the elevated 'L' tracks — and has been the Midwest's centre of the jewellery trade for well over a century. Behind its old shopfronts, and stacked up its early skyscrapers, sit hundreds of independent jewellers, diamond dealers, setters and watchmakers, many of them family firms several generations deep. The city council formally named this piece of Wabash "Jewelers Row" in 1985, and in 2003 the district became an official Chicago landmark, protecting buildings put up between 1872 and 1941.

It is a smaller, quieter cousin of New York's 47th Street, and one of the most storied shopping streets in America. Here is how it came to be — and which parts of its famous tale are actually true.

A street rebuilt after the fire

The Great Chicago Fire of October 1871 flattened most of the city's business district, Wabash Avenue included. What rose in its place was a new generation of sturdy commercial loft buildings — the earliest survivors in the landmark district date from 1872, the very first wave of rebuilding — followed over the decades by Chicago School towers and Art Deco shopfronts. The roll call of architects who worked on the street reads like a history of the city itself: Adler & Sullivan, D. H. Burnham & Co. and Holabird & Roche all left buildings here.

The jewellery trade gathered on Wabash gradually. The city's landmark commission dates the consolidation to the decades between 1890 and America's entry into the First World War, by which point the street was the recognised centre of Chicago's jewellery, silverware and watch trades — small workshops and wholesalers stacked in upper-floor offices above ground-level showrooms. The Loop 'L' tracks running directly overhead gave the block the character it keeps to this day: velvet-lined windows full of diamonds glittering away beneath rumbling steel.

The Mallers Building: a jewellery district turned on its end

If the district has a heart, it is the Mallers Building at 5 South Wabash. Built in 1911 to a design by Christian A. Eckstorm, this slender tower was conceived as something quite modern for its time: a vertical marketplace where dozens of independent jewellers, cutters, engravers and repairers could work under one secure, prestigious roof rather than scattered across the city.

That idea never went out of fashion. Today the building houses the Jewelers Center — trading, by its own account, since 1921 — which brings together more than 180 jewellers under one roof and claims the largest concentration of them anywhere in the Midwest, along with an accredited gemmological laboratory. The experience of shopping there has changed remarkably little: you ride a lift, get buzzed through a door, and find yourself talking across a counter to someone whose parents and grandparents may have sold rings from the same room. It is jewellery retail as it existed before the shopping mall — and still very much alive.

The building where cars rode the lifts

A short walk north, at 35 East Wacker Drive, stands the district's most theatrical landmark: the Jewelers' Building, completed in 1927 to designs by Joachim Giæver and Frederick P. Dinkelberg. Forty storeys and 523 feet of ornamented terracotta, crowned with a great dome and four smaller corner cupolas, it was briefly the tallest building in the world outside New York — and built expressly with the jewellery trade, and its security anxieties, in mind.

The famous story about this building is true. In the 1920s, a jeweller's most dangerous moments were the walk between car and office with stones in a pocket. The solution was extraordinary: a central automobile lift. A tenant could drive in off the street, steer onto the elevator, and be carried up to a parking level beside their own floor — the garage core ran up the first twenty-three storeys, held some 625 cars, and was promoted in its day as the tallest garage in the world. No pavement, no exposure, no opportunistic thief. The system lasted about fourteen years before being defeated by, of all things, car design: by 1940, new automobiles had grown too wide for the lifts, and the garage floors were converted to ordinary offices. The building still wears its jewel-box architecture proudly, right down to the six-ton Father Time clock at its Wacker Drive corner — a gift of the Elgin National Watch Company, and a nod to the watch trade upstairs.

The Capone legend, honestly told

Then there is the story everyone repeats: that the great dome atop 35 East Wacker once hid a speakeasy run by, or for, Al Capone. It is told on boat and walking tours all over Chicago, and we should say plainly: it is a legend, not supported by the record.

Here is what is verified. The dome's famous tenant was the Stratosphere Club, a perfectly legal restaurant and cocktail lounge opened in March 1937 by restaurateur Paul Streeter. Its kitchen sat on the 37th floor, its dining rooms on the 38th and 39th, and its cocktail lounge in the dome itself on the 40th — reportedly decorated on a hot-air-balloon theme. The timeline is the problem for the legend: by then, Prohibition had been over for more than three years and Capone had been in Alcatraz since 1934. There was nothing to speak easy about and no gangster upstairs; the Capone connection appears to have been bolted on afterwards — the sort of story Chicago keeps telling because it feels as if it ought to be true. The truth is arguably better anyway: a building so devoted to protecting diamonds that it let the cars ride the lifts.

Jewelers Row and 47th Street, side by side

Chicagoans sometimes call Jewelers Row the Midwest's answer to New York's Diamond District, and the comparison is fair — we've written a full history of how 47th Street became the centre of America's diamond trade. The two streets rhyme without repeating.

The honest difference is scale. 47th Street is where much of the country's diamond inventory changes hands at wholesale; Wabash Avenue is a place where ordinary couples have always shopped face to face. If New York's district is a trading floor, Chicago's is a high street.

Shopping the Row today

Jewelers Row remains a living district, and buying an engagement ring there is a genuine Chicago tradition — walking the counters, comparing stones, negotiating with someone who cuts out the layers between you and the goods. If you go, our advice is the same as we give anywhere: buy the certificate first and the sparkle second. Insist on an independent grading report from a respected laboratory, check that the report number matches the stone (a laser inscription on the girdle makes this easy), and compare prices per carat across at least a few counters before deciding. Our guide to IGI certification explains exactly how to read a report, and our engagement ring guide covers the rest of the decision, from setting styles to sizing.

One thing has changed since the Mallers Building first filled with tenants: what sits inside the velvet trays. Lab-grown diamonds — chemically and optically identical to mined stones, at a fraction of the price — are now a growing part of the trade on streets like this, just as they are online. If you're weighing the choice, our plain-English comparison of lab-grown versus natural diamonds lays out the differences without the sales pitch.

At Signora, we sit a long way from Wabash Avenue — every piece we make is made to order in our workshop in Surat, India — but we work by the same old Jewelers Row logic: cut out the middle layers, be straight about what a stone is, and let the certificate do the talking. Every diamond we set is IGI-certified with the report number laser-inscribed on its girdle, and every engagement ring ships to the US, UK and Canada with duties prepaid, about two weeks door to door. Different street, same handshake.