![]() ![]() Anything finicky and beautiful for the forearm down seemed represented in the halls. A corridor lined with storefronts of varying sizes, selling jewelry, watch repair, watch parts and tools, pearls, diamonds, gems, settings, design. The 11th foor of the Mallers is, presumably, like the other 20. Nowak’s tiny shop sits amid other tradesmen’s. It’s a surprisingly technical and demanding process, with an 11-page description just outlining the skills, knowledge and professionalism a CW21 must have. That’s the full and official title of the CW21 certification he has from the American Watchmakers-Clockmakers Institute. But the two times now my cherished Skagen Denmark has needed service - once for fit, Tuesday for battery replacement - I’ve headed to see Daniel Nowak, Certified Watchmaker of the 21st Century. I doubt we’ve traded 20 words, and he has no idea who I am. My guy is a pleasant, funny old man on the 11th floor. Maze hallways sometimes spilled onto grimy service elevators and open closets, which Would Not Have Passed a century-plus-three ago when service was king and everyone wore hats.īut my nonromantic Girl Friday and I strode past all that to head to our destination. A textured and embellished elevator door had a hole in it, I guess where a workman decided to cut through rather than open panels. Stately and beautiful, but clearly not what it was. It’s beautiful and grim inside the building the dragonfly zipped past. Online sales, declining marketplaces, anything to explain where the fine men and women of these trades disappeared to.īut here’s the secret: They’re still there. Foreign trade killed it, or the policies of the political party you oppose. Another tale of loss and rage, uselessness and impotence in the face of your choice of American bugbear. It’s seemingly another disappeared district, former merchants of a trade made way for panhandlers and chain restaurants where they sell calendars of their sexy kilted waitstaff.Īnother sad story, goodbye. The building is one of many on the stretch of Wabash called Jeweler’s Row. On the side where the Chicago Style of architecture gives up the terra cotta pretense and just admits it’s brick all the way through, a dapple of oddly placed in-window air conditioners from various decades give a better clue to the Mallers Building’s guts. On the side aimed at Wabash, where front-facing terra cotta has gotten grimed by repeated passes of trains and cars and construction equipment over the past century-plus-three, a gaudy, flashing two-story sign from a 1990s rebrand that never quite took calls it the Jewelers Center. The building itself was old, crumbly and glorious. It zipped by shuttered stores and tourists huddled around iPhone map apps, startled a young woman in short shorts and a jam-packed halter, licked between a rumbling Loop train above and a delivery van below to skim a construction worker jam-packing a grimy T-shirt near the chain link and tarp separating the dingy building and the street. A dragonfly zipped through the pre-lunch swelter. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |