This Jewelry Shop Has Kept Lower Manhattan Sparkling For 70 Years

In 1954, Eva Busch’s great-uncle, Martin Busch, opened a jewelry store on William Street, near what is now the Federal Reserve checkpoint. Seven decades later, Martin Busch Jewelers is still providing downtowners (and all New Yorkers) with gorgeous fine jewelry and custom pieces, now from a cozy storefront at 85 John St. Eva says that according to family lore, her great-uncle fell in love with Lower Manhattan as a traveling salesman hawking Zippo lighters. A natural-born marketer whose wife’s family worked in the jewelry wholesale business, Martin Busch started operating a small booth downtown selling jewelry before debuting his William Street storefront. 

“He brought my grandfather into the business as well, so my grandparents also owned a jewelry store,” Eva told the Downtown Alliance. “That’s how it goes in the jewelry business usually. It’s family.”

Indeed, Martin Busch Jewelers has stayed in the family the whole time. Martin ran the store until 1994, when Eva’s parents took over, and he continued to work there until he died in 2006. Eva’s father retired in 2013, though her mother still works full-time; Eva, who worked at the store in the summer when she was a teenager and during college, is now the store’s general manager, having rejoined the business a little over 10 years ago. A Lower Manhattan resident herself, she’s seen the neighborhood change quite a bit over the years as it’s gone from a primarily commercial center to more of a residential neighborhood.

“We still have a lot of customers who work down here, which I would say is our core, but we definitely get many more residents,” she said. Plus, with the advent of the internet, the store is able to reach customers who live and work outside the neighborhood. “You wouldn’t really get anybody from much farther than Lower Manhattan and now we get a ton of customers from Brooklyn and Jersey,” Eva said.

Martin Busch Jewelers has always had a devoted customer base. After 9/11, Eva says, the store was closed down for a while, but once it was able to open up, customers came flooding in. Similarly, during the Covid pandemic, even though many people were working remotely, and many downtown residents had left the city, people still came to the store to support the business. 

“I think downtown kind of gets a reputation for not being a community, and that really couldn’t be further from the truth,” Eva said. “People really made an effort to come to see us and to spend money with us and to continue to patronize us, even though most of our customers weren’t here.”

Martin Busch Jewelers specializes in custom pieces (they also have in-stock designs and do repairs) and Eva and her team work hard to make sure every customer is happy with their designs. Once, she even managed to rush a custom ring that should have taken three-to-six-weeks to make, to a man who was getting on a flight in 10 days to go to Italy to propose to his girlfriend. Eva managed to get the ring finished in the 11th hour.

“My husband drove me to the men’s jeweler in Midtown to pick up this ring, because I didn’t have time to take the train. We’re driving back downtown, and when we hit 6th Avenue, traffic is at a standstill. I literally got out of my husband’s car and ran down 6th Avenue to get to the store [in time to make the deadline],” she said. “One of the girls texted me to tell me the customer was here, and I’m like, ‘I’m running down Broadway, I’m coming!’” She did, in fact, manage to get the ring to the him in time, he made his flight, and now he’s a regular customer.

And if there’s one thing Eva wants people to know about Martin Busch Jewelers, it’s this: “We’re here,” she said. “We’re surprised by how many people are like, ‘I didn’t know you were here.’ Because we were here before everything else.”