From Antwerp Refugees to America's Diamond Capital
Walk down West 47th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenue today and you'll see hundreds of storefronts, exchanges, and wholesalers packed into a single city block, still handling the majority of diamonds that enter the United States. But the story of how this one block became the center of the American diamond trade starts thousands of miles away, in Antwerp.
For centuries, Antwerp, Belgium was the beating heart of the global diamond trade, built largely by Jewish diamond cutters and merchants. That changed with the rise of Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. As Europe descended into war, Jewish diamond families fled Antwerp and Amsterdam, and many of them landed in New York City, bringing generations of cutting, polishing, and trading expertise with them. They needed somewhere central to set up shop, and 47th Street, close to the jewelry retailers of Fifth Avenue, became that place.
By the 1940s, the block had its own rhythm: deals sealed with a handshake and the Yiddish phrase "mazel und broche" (luck and blessing) rather than paperwork, a trading floor culture built entirely on trust between families who had known each other for generations, and a concentration of cutting and polishing talent unmatched anywhere else in the country. In 1941, the merchants and jewelers on the block formed the Diamond Dealers Club to bring order and self-governance to the growing trade.
The Diamond District survived the decades that followed by staying exactly what it always was: a tight-knit, largely family-run trade grounded in relationships and expertise, even as the surrounding blocks of Midtown Manhattan transformed around it. Today, an estimated 80% of the diamonds sold in the United States pass through this single block at some point in the supply chain, from rough stone to finished jewelry.
That history is exactly what we walk you through on The New York Tour of Diamonds. You'll stand where those Antwerp families set up their first counters, see how the trade still runs today, and learn to look at a diamond the way three generations of experts on this block have looked at them.