Inside the Oldest Jewelry Studio in the United States
Three generations of jewelry design and sculpture thrive in North Beach
The moment you walk through the front door of Macchiarini Creative Design and Gallery on Grant Avenue in San Francisco’s North Beach district, you know you’ve entered a creative space. Behind the glass-encased jewelry, family memorabilia, and gallery is the atelier where you’ll find Dan Macchiarini, 66, and his daughter, Emma.
Across three generations, jewelry design and sculpture have been a family legacy since 1948, when Dan’s father, Peter Macchiarini, first opened his jewelry-design studio and gallery a few doors down from its current upper Grant Avenue location.
Barely visible through a layer of dust and metal filings, Dan and Emma’s workbench is blanketed with a panoply of mallets, calipers, pliers, protractors, files, assorted drill bits, and burs. As with the production of most art, jewelry design is a messy process.
Dan is clearly happy at what he does best: jewelry-making and metal sculpture. Sitting under a bright neon lamp, he’s carefully filing a silver bracelet while wearing a protective leather cap and a tool-laden apron. Peering below his magnifying glasses through warm bespectacled eyes, he greets me with a gentle smile, which is framed by his graying horseshoe mustache and trimmed goatee.
“Welcome to Macchiarini Creative Design,” he says proudly. He introduces me to Emma, in her mid-30s, and a younger co-worker and Telegraph Hill resident, Julia Farrow. The two women are intently working at an adjacent bench. The pungent metallic smell of acid, polishing chemicals, and welded metal permeates the small confines as they meld raw metal and semiprecious stones into unique works of art. Music from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band sets the creative mood as each designer is intently focused on honing their jewelry pieces.
As I take photographs, we share a few memories of North Beach and our common Italian heritage (I grew up in the neighborhood from 1946 through the mid-60s) and lament some of the changes that threaten the neighborhood’s charm and culture. What remains of “Little Italy” has become a melting pot of ethnicities and pocket communities. While cultural evolution and the retrofitting of buildings and public spaces are a prerequisite for growth, the ascendant tech industry continues to price out many of the area’s restaurants and creatives.
“There’s a lot of pressure for North Beach to evolve in a different way,” said Dan. As president of the North Beach Business Association, which has been a major force to preserve the neighborhood’s unique character for small businesses, he has seen many changes in the area. “The great thing about North Beach is that we don’t do formula retail.”
Despite local efforts to preserve the neighborhood’s small-business community, North Beach’s retail vacancy rate has risen from 13% in 2017 to 21% in 2018 — ranking fourth among the city’s 24 recognized neighborhood commercial districts. The citywide average is 12%, according to a city survey reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.
“You can’t get this experience online or from Amazon or from formula retail. If you come here, you get this experience. This is what we’re selling.”
A long city-permit process and high construction costs, seismic retrofits, high rents, and labor costs, as well as fires that gutted two historic buildings, have taken their toll on the community’s fragile retail ecosystem. But Macchiarini Creative Design is still here. “Our studio has adapted over the past 71 years as my daughter and I continue to evolve the business,” Dan said. “We’re the oldest jewelry-design and sculpture studio gallery in the U.S., and recognized as a San Francisco Legacy Business.”
Dan and Emma have deep roots in the area, starting with Peter Macchiarini, whom the Board of Supervisors declared a “San Francisco legend” before his death in 2001 at the age of 91. Peter was a Sonoma County–born son of Italian immigrants, who pioneered modernist metalwork design and avant-garde rings, bracelets, and brooches using gold, silver, and other metals.
The elder Macchiarini was also a longtime beloved North Beach local who did everything from hobnobbing with WPA artists such as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to designing his own African-inspired jewelry, including a wedding ring for Beat-era icon Neal Cassady. He also co-founded the Upper Grant Avenue Street Fair, the country’s first street fair, which is better known today as the North Beach Festival.
Peter first opened the store in the fall of 1948 at 1415 Grant Avenue, where it stayed until he moved 10 years later to 1422 Grant Avenue. Then, the studio saw its final home at 1529B Grant Avenue.
Dan describes himself as a sculptor rather than a jeweler. “Dot jewelry” — rings, earrings, bracelets, and brooches — is one of Macchiarini’s specialties and an example of the “neo-modernist” design that distinguishes his work. “Our pieces are wearable sculptures,” he explains. “Most jewelry tends to be flat; what we do is more three-dimensional and has layers in it. You’re looking into a landscape, a space-scape that conveys a sense of depth,” he said pointing at a dot ring.
Explaining his design approach, he shows me recent earring designs and Burning Man rings that have been popular with clients. Incorporating some of his father’s design elements, his work integrates abstract angles, lines, and orbs of various sizes, creating a fanciful sense of balance.
The store also offers workshops for couples to make their own wedding rings. When Dan moved to the current location in 2007, he had a surfeit of square footage, and Emma wanted to turn it into educational space after she got her art degree.
“My grandfather had taught before at Mills College. That’s how he met his wife,” Emma said. “I had a desire to teach all along because we have a specific way of doing things — every metalsmith does. We wanted to bring this style to other people.”
Today, the studio conducts four classes a week, each with seven to eight people. Emma, who also teaches jewelry design and drawing at the San Francisco Art Institute, has subsequently expanded her workshops to corporate clients, offering a type of team building in the form of metalsmithing days.
Emma said that for a while she wasn’t sure if she wanted to continue the family’s business — it was touch and go. “People walk in, and they can’t believe the energy here. We’ve created a whole experience. You can’t get this experience online or from Amazon or from formula retail. If you come here, you get this experience. This is what we’re selling.”
After my last interview and photo shoot with Dan and Emma, I ended the day with a coffee break at Caffe Trieste a few blocks away. As I sip my caffè macchiato — an espresso with a “dot” of foamed milk — the diminutive form of the Italian word macchiato (“spotted”) comes to mind. I realized that macchiarini, loosely defined, means “little dots.”
I suspect Peter Macchiarini, renowned for his pragmatism, must have known this.
Charles Versaggi is a native San Franciscan of Italian-Sicilian heritage. His current project is “North Beach Light,” a collection of photo essays that reflect on his early years of living in North Beach when it was the city’s “Italianita” and the center of Beat lifestyle, topless bars, and jazz clubs, leading to flower power and the Summer of Love. Contact: charlesversaggi@me.com
