Jeweler's Row
Wabash Avenue between East Washington and East Monroe Streets
Chicago, IL 60603
Wabash was the backside of Michigan Avenue.
Michigan was show. Fronted on the Park, it looked out on statuary, the Art Institute and the lake. It was a grand white stone European vision. Michigan Avenue was Old Chicago money patting itself on the back.
Wabash, running parallel, was, to me, a truer Chicago. The street was always dark. It ran underneath the “L”; the sun never hit Wabash Avenue. It was always noisy. It was a masculine street. It was a business street. David Mamet’s “Back Street of Dreams: Coming of Age on Wabash Avenue, the world of wonder under the ‘L’” Chicago Tribune, October 7, 1990
What a different world. I remember the salesman at Iwan Ries Tobacco store schooling me in the niceties of tobacco smoking as they sold me my first pipe—delighted to be passing on a tradition. I remember buying English Oval cigarettes there. I loved the box and the shape. Someone told me that you were supposed to squeeze them to recompress them into a round shape, but I never did this, and if it was the right thing to do, I didn’t want to know. They tasted, to me, of powder, and never exotic—much more so than the heavier Balkan Sobranies, which, it must be admitted, came in the best package anything has ever come in—that small, flat white metal tin, which held 10 cigarettes, or, later, a couple of bills and a driver’s license, vitamins—it occurs to me that, even at the time, one knew that there was not really a hell of a lot of things which the Sobranie case was perfectly suited to accommodate—but what it promised to offer. David Mamet’s “Back Street of Dreams: Coming of Age on Wabash Avenue, the world of wonder under the ‘L’ “ Chicago Tribune, October 7. 1990
Jeweler’s Row is what it sounds like: a two-block line of stores that sell precious stones. Diamonds, for literary purposes, write their own stories—they’re small, incredibly valuable, and almost ask to be stolen. Several Chicago films, including Michael Mann’s Thief and David Singer’s Imperfections built their screenplays on this premise. The alley between 7 and 15 S. Wabash, between the Maller Building to the south and The Iwan Reis Building to the north, is the location for the opening scene of Thief, starring James Caan.
Officially opening in 1872, a series of traditionally small-scale businesses occupied both ground-floor storefronts and upper-floor offices along two blocks of South Wabash Avenue. In 1912, the Mallers Building at 5 S. Wabash began to house jewelry manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers, putting Jeweler's Row on the map. By World War II, the most important Chicago firms, like Sherman Tucker and M.Y. Finkelman, had located there. Finkelman's son, Marshall, brought international fame to the Chicago jewelry trade in international gem markets and opened the Jeweler's Center in the late 1980s.
The 1900’s was a popular time for jewelers from Mexico, South America, and Southeast Asia who brought new ethnic trends to Jeweler's Row. In its early years, jewelers held public events where hundreds of Chicagoans would try their luck at “ducking for diamonds,” a novelty promotion modeled after bobbing for apples that promised prizes of actual diamonds and led to throngs of spectators blocking Wabash Avenue.
D.H. Burnham and Company architect Peter J. Weber designed The Silversmith Building on the west side of the street. It was built in 1890 in response to the transition from Romanesque Revival architecture to the Arts and Crafts Movement.
On July 9, 2003, the City Council officially recognized the Jewelers Row District as a Chicago Landmark, partly in recognition of the historically significant buildings built between 1872 and 1941.
Mann grew up in Chicago and attended Amundsen High School on the North Side. For Thief, he cast real Chicago police detectives, notably Dennis Farina, and employed genuine thieves as technical advisers. Caan plays Frank, an ex-con operating as an independent safecracker who runs into problems extricating himself from the Chicago Mob’s influence. The last big heist, a staple of these kinds of movies, happens in Los Angeles, but much of the first half of the film is set in Chicago, though not specifically Jeweler’s Row.
Longtime Chicago artist Singer wrote and directed the 2018 small-budget film Imperfections, which is set on Jeweler’s Row. He also composed much of the music. Cassidy Harper (played by Virginia Kull) is a 30-year-old, out-of-work actress, sleeping on her mother’s couch and scheming one last chance to make a success out of her flailing career. Chicago native Marilu Henner plays her mother. Cassidy realizes that the window for her to succeed as an actress is about to close, and determines to raise enough money to go where she’ll have one last chance. Cassidy takes a job as a diamond courier, or runner, meaning that she unobtrusively delivers jewelry to clients within the neighborhood. This helps, but not enough, and so Cassidy conspires with her boss’s son to steal diamonds and cash them in for a move to Hollywood. In an interview on WGN, Singer said. “There are people populating Imperfections who are at different stages of that realization of taking stock of their lives and who they are and where they’re going and how the rest of their lives are going to play out.” And about his ties to the city, Singer added, “We wanted to make a Chicago movie for Chicago people that looks like actual Chicago and not postcard Chicago…the Chicago the way that we know it, with filthy alleys and streetlights and the el train, and the real place that we live.”
In his 2018 novel Chicago, Mamet explicitly features Wabash Avenue, with a character reflecting on the "El" train clattering overhead and the street being constantly in shadow.
In The Cabin, Mamet wrote about the Iwan Ries & Co. pipe shop on Wabash Avenue. A scene in U.S. Marshals was shot inside the tobacco store; the University Club held their Cigar Society meetings there in 2008, with author Achy Obejas as one of the speakers. The Little Jewelers Building (15-17 S. Wabash), now the Iwan Reis Building, was built in 1882 and is the only surviving Adler & Sullivan structure inside the Loop.
