Glitter, Jitters in the Jewelry District
On Saturdays, much of downtown Los Angeles moves with a sad kind of slowness. The skyscrapers are closed, the workers gone for the weekend. Few come to shop. Few come, as they do in other cities, to stroll the streets.
But tucked away in the heart of downtown is the jewelry district, a bustling shopping area that even in a time of uncertainty provides a glimpse of the possibilities that some insist exist here.
“This is Los Angeles,” says Peklar Pilavjian, a jeweler who has worked in the district for 22 years. “All of the languages. People from around the world. Lots of things going on. One big melting pot.”
Facing the possibility that the jewelry district could be crippled by state concerns over hazardous pollution coming from manufacturers there, many are worried that things could change.
For now, though, walk the district’s sidewalks--running roughly from 5th to 8th Street and from Grand Avenue to Broadway and you quickly get a sense of what Pilavjian means.
The shops glisten with gold and diamonds. There is salsa music mixed with the voices of men cutting deals, mixed with the buzz of immigrants soldering and buffing jewelry.
“It’s a happening, a miniature international city,” said Lauren Melendrez, an urban planner who recently moved her office into the area from Highland Park. “A part of downtown that feels good.”
Melendrez noted that the few downtown areas that seem filled with nonstop vitality--the jewelry district, the fashion district, Little Tokyo and a stretch of Broadway--are powered by the energy of immigrants. “The beauty of it all is that these areas are busy but distinct in there own ways. Distinct in Old World kinds of ways.”
The sidewalks of the jewelry district are full of people from all corners of the world. There are the recent arrivals-- workers and sellers mostly--from countries like Turkey, Iran and India. Mixed with them are people shopping for rings, bracelets, watches.
Some buy, some window-shop. Some spend money at the delicatessens and pizza and cigar shops--small businesses that in the last decade have sprouted up around the diamond importers and jewelry merchants.
“This is a place where middle-class people can go to buy jewelry,” said Deanna Thompson as she looked at a window full of merchandise. “The deals are a whole lot better than you get at the shopping mall.”
Thompson, like most people shopping on a recent Saturday, didn’t know that this is also a neighborhood feeling threatened after the June decision by the California Environmental Protection Agency to halt manufacturing in one building after the discovery of hazardous pollutants.
The agency asked the state attorney general to sue the owners of the Park Central Building at 412 West 6th St. No lawsuit has yet been filed, but the attorney general in June ordered the building’s owners to stop jewelry manufacturing operations there. The building was found to have hazardous levels of cadmium, copper, chromium, lead, nickel, silver and zinc.
Though the state has ordered a halt to manufacturing, most of the small businesses in the building continue to operate. Workers there say that little has changed, aside from the fact that one or two of the manufacturers being closely monitored by the state had ceased making jewelry.
The concern in the district is that the entire building will eventually be closed down, and that the state will not stop there.
Businesspeople like Pilavjian, vice president of the Armenian Jewelers’ Assn., fear that the California EPA could end up closing 35 or 40 more buildings. Such a move, some say, would cost about 15,000 jobs, significantly damage a downtown trying to bounce back from decades of malaise, and cut into the city’s tax base.
“It would be devastation,” said Rostom Tchalekiam, a watch seller who came to the United States 17 years ago from civil war-torn Lebanon. “For thousands of years, people have been making jewelry. The state needs to respect this and find a way to work with us.”
Over the last 30 years, the downtown jewelry district has blossomed into one of Los Angeles’ most remarkable economic success stories, fueled almost entirely by recent immigrants. So many people have come here to run businesses, to work and to shop that the area has become one of the largest such enterprises in the nation, second only to New York’s jewelry district.
The area first boomed in the 1970s as craftsmen from Latin America merged with Armenians fleeing strife in Lebanon and other countries, moving into the rundown and abandoned buildings that peppered the area. Immigrants from Iran, Russia, Afghanistan, India, Israel and elsewhere soon joined them.
The new owners and workers moved into buildings that, for the most part, were never intended to be used for crafting jewelry. Some of the current operations are housed in makeshift, poorly constructed work spaces, contributing to the environmental problems.
The district was booming by the late 1980s, then weathered the recession that tore at much of Los Angeles in the early 1990s. In recent years, business has steadily increased.
Though a dollar figure for the amount of business done in the area is almost impossible to quantify--because much of the business is done by an exchange of cash and a handshake--the businesses pay an estimated $11 million in taxes to the city each year, according to a recent study.
Over time, the jewelry industry has fallen into a particular pattern: Small, mostly family-owned retailers sell their wares on the ground floors of buildings such as the sprawling St. Vincent Jewelry Center.
As at the 6th Street building targeted by the California EPA, buildings, most of the jewelry is manufactured on the top floors, where gold, silver and platinum items are created and then sold by the retailers.
Although the manufacturers are the lifeline keeping many of the retailers afloat by providing a steady supply of jewelry, a few do run slipshod operations--according to businessmen like Pilavjian.
Some Likened to Sweatshops
The state EPA is focusing on manufacturers that it says operate like sweatshops, with workers crammed into tight spaces, breathing in dust and potentially toxic air. Such operations, according to the state agency, can expose workers to the hazards created by the welding, buffing, grinding and manipulation of precious metals.
Businesspeople in the area acknowledge that there are problems, but they insist that efforts to improve things are underway. And that’s why they are frustrated.
“Everything I have worked for, everything I have sweated and toiled and bled over, it is all being threatened,” said Edward Nizamian, a Turkish immigrant who opened a business on Hill Street in the early 1970s.
Places like the jewelry district were once “foreboding, a bit scary,” said shopper Peter Olah as he strolled Hill Street with his wife, Kristina, on Saturday.
Olah recalled coming to the district to buy his wife an engagement ring in the 1970s. He said the area was shabby and uninviting back then.
But the Newport Beach couple said they gave downtown Los Angeles another chance after attending Los Angeles Clippers basketball games. The jewelry district has become a favorite.
“It’s just exciting to see all of the activity down here, and to see all of the great buildings,” Kristina Olah said. “We just like coming to walk around. Too bad more people don’t know about it.”
Inside many of the buildings, though, the view is different.
A Mexican immigrant who works in the targeted 6th Street building stood near a fire escape there recently, drinking a beer and pondering his next move. He said nothing much has changed inside the structure.
Miguel, who didn’t want to give his last name, said he makes jewelry on the dingy and cramped 12th floor, 12 feet from a business cited by the state for creating a health hazard. That company has stopped operating, he said. Given the possibility of a far-reaching state crackdown, he thinks he may lose his job.
“I am not sure what the problem is, but we see the inspector coming here almost every day recently and they are asking about the air,” said Miguel.
Worker May Have to Leave L.A.
Like many other workers, Miguel said he comes to Los Angeles for about five months each year from Mexico just to work in the jewelry district.
“I am already getting ready to leave Los Angeles if they close this building down,” he said. “Myself and my friends are worried that there will be no more work.”
The word on the street, he said, is “Go to San Francisco. There the jewelers have no problem.”
