|
THE ART OF THE CUTTER
Street
between New York's Fifth and Sixth Avenues (today the "Maiden Lane" of
the diamond industry). We enter one of the tall loft buildings and get
off at the thirteenth floor which, however, is superstitiously marked
"14-A." This floor is entirely occupied by a firm named Baumgold
Brothers, Inc. Their shop is selected because it is the largest in the
United States, employing nearly 100 of the 450 cutters working in the
30 or more shops of the country. What is more, because of the German
invasion of the Lowlands and the resultant shutting off of the
Amsterdam and Antwerp cutting plants, it became in the second year of the second World War the largest operating diamond-cutting plant in the world.
Yet it is typical of the other and smaller shops, whose proprietors were taught diamond cutting by their fathers who in
turn were taught by their fathers, and so on even to the fourth
generation back. You do not enter this shop easily even if known, and
not at all if a stranger, unless pour business has been thoroughly
certified beforehand. In an anteroom you peer through a small
steel-barred window covered with a bulletproof glass door. You press a
button md someone stares out at you appraisingly. If you are
acceptable, there is a buzz and a clicking sound and you know you are
permitted to open the door.
If
you are escorted into the Executive Lounge called the Private Office,
you will find on the wall the painting of a man in his fifties. This is
a likeness of the "founder of the firm, Isadore M. Baumgold, first of
three generations of Baumgold cutters. Born in Warsaw, he was for a
time a dealer in diamonds. He came to the United States in 1895 and set
up an office, as did others, in Maiden Lane.
He still was a dealer—or importer. There was a 10-per-cent duty on polished goods which made importing gems ex-
(83) .
|
||
|
|
||