A Beginner’s Guide to Antique Shopping in the Coachella Valley
The Coachella Valley is known for its great secondhand stores, but if you have no idea where to start, let us help you.
OK, let’s get back to gold and silver. Judging from your recent inquiries, there is still a lot of interest out there in capitalizing on the current rise in precious metal prices. As I write this, the spot price of pure silver stands at $32.23 per ounce and gold at a near-record $2,563.51. Many of us have a few bits of jewelry or flatware that we don’t use and wouldn’t miss, and now might be a good time to sell. There are dozens of retail buyers out there clamoring for your attention, but you might want consider another route if your jewelry box or flatware hutch is overflowing.
Go where the retail buyers go: to an assayer.
While there are no assayers that I know of here in the Coachella Valley, there are quite a few in Los Angeles’ downtown jewelry district. The area covers several square blocks between Hill and Main streets and from 3rd to 9th. Most buildings date to the 1920s and the architecture remains beautiful even if the street life has become somewhat gritty. Last week I visited L.A. Gold Assaying at 635 South Hill Street to see how the process works. The drive is miserable and the parking challenging, but it’s a fascinating part of the jewelry business that most people never see.
My destination was in an old building reminiscent of New York City. We passed an inattentive doorman and went up the creaky elevator to the fifth floor. The offices were small and little English was heard, but there was a line of waiting customers that gave us confidence.
The front man took our silver, quickly used a magnet to remove any foreign metal, and dropped what remained into a flaming furnace burning at about 1,300 degrees Centigrade. The container inside the furnace was made of graphite and ceramic and looked to be about the size of a tube you would use at a bank drive-up window. After a few minutes, the molten silver drained into a mold and was tossed into a sink of water to cool. The result was a heavy brick about the size of a bar of soap.
The process was repeated with what little gold we had, but gold is more heat resistant than silver and the melting took about 20 minutes. This brick was much smaller, about the size of a travel bar of soap.
Once cooled, a tiny sample of each brick was removed to ascertain purity, and the metals went into something that looked like a giant scanner. Before long, a report on the screen indicated the purity of each brick down to 100th of one percent. There is more chemistry involved in ascertaining the purity of gold rather than silver, but both bricks had trace elements of platinum and other metals.
It was also interesting to discover that items marked sterling silver or 14k gold are rarely exactly that.
In any event, some numbers were crunched, the bricks went into a giant safe and we were paid cash in an amount very near the day’s spot price. The entire transaction took about 45 minutes.
As for other noteworthy details, there weren’t very many. No names are taken and no records kept of who is paid what, so there is anonymity to the transaction that may be attractive to some. There is also a melting cost of about $35 and customers can choose to retain their bricks or be paid in cash. Most assayers will not buy finished goods like rings or flatware; everything must first be melted to confirm the metal content.
Our front man unceremoniously took a hammer to our larger silver pieces so they would fit into the furnace, making it clear that there’s no turning back if you change your mind at the last minute.
And that’s about it. When it was all over, my fellow dealer who came along was more than $9,000 richer and exceedingly pleased with the result. My own take was much more pedestrian but still very satisfactory.
As with all businesses, some assayers are more honest than others, and you should watch the whole process carefully to make sure everything is accounted for. It’s a long day and will likely involve some urban anxiety, but you’ll be omitting the middleman and almost certainly come out ahead.
Mike Rivkin and his wife, Linda, are long-time residents of Rancho Mirage. For many years, he was an award-winning catalogue publisher and has authored seven books, along with countless articles. Now, he’s the owner of Antique Galleries of Palm Springs. His antiques column appears Sundays in The Desert Sun. Want to send Mike a question about antiques? Drop him a line at info@silverfishpress.com.