Miami,
Los Angeles, etc. I could name many more cities, and justifiably so in
order to stress the point that New York is not the only great diamond
"center" in the United States. For instance, in gross retail diamond
sales the New York metropolitan area is hardly as important as the oil
country of the Southwest.
Forty-seventh
Street and Rockefeller Center form the aristocratic heart of the
diamond-dealing world. But there are other important arteries that
reach, so far as New York is concerned, downtown, centering upon the
Diamond Dealers Club, which sprawls over an entire floor of a building
in narrow and bustling Nassau Street. Ordinarily, you can't get in
unless you are a member. Once inside you realize why it is more
exclusive than all the clubs on Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue combined.
It
is a casual place, and business is done casually. It has an Old World
air about it. Men sit at tables and sip coffee and munch sandwiches
served from the club kitchen. These men are dealers. Most of them are
refugees. They are the men who put fortunes in diamonds into brief
cases and packages and escaped Europe's modern reigning terror.
Strangely, they are not the conservatively but expensively dressed men
you see in West 47th Street or Rockefeller Center. They belong to the
fringes of the trade. They have goods to sell—diamonds. Here is a man
with a large mustache and a broken accent. He sips his coffee, eats his
sandwich, brings out a paper package, unfolds it. Lying on the paper
are several stones, some small, some large. If they are extremely
small—of the melee size—the man across the table becomes immediately
interested. He knows you can get plenty of the "sizes," but it is
difficult to obtain the melee.
He takes up one of these stones and trains his "loupe"
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