At high-end pawnshop, the loan is in the bag
After she lost her job, Angela Rivers found herself in need of some quick cash.
Instead of heading to her bank, she delved into her Brooklyn closet. The avid shoe and handbag collector took out her cherished chocolate-brown Birkin and went across the river to Manhattan to the New York Loan Co., a pawnshop.
On West 47th Street, the pawnshop visitors edge past fast-talking gold hawkers, jewelry hustlers, murmurs of Yiddish slang and ever-present police to enter the gleaming 35-story International Gem Tower, where the business is housed on the third floor.
There, Rivers planned to use her handbag for a loan.
In the marble lobby, visitors are fingerprinted and pass through an X-ray scanner before ascending in a secured elevator.
Inside the pawnshop, glittering vintage and new diamonds and other baubles from the likes of Harry Winston, Van Cleef & Arpels and Cartier are tastefully encased in glass.
Jordan Tabach-Bank, chief executive of New York Loan Co., picked the location because of its grand setting and high level of security.
Pawnshops aren’t simply for selling goods for a quick buck. They also allow customers to use their valuables — including something such as Rivers’ Birkin, valued at several thousand dollars — as collateral in exchange for an on-the-spot loan. When a client pays back the loan, with interest, the valuables are returned. If the loan isn’t repaid, the shop owns the goods.
Tabach-Bank is a third-generation pawnbroker. He modeled his New York outpost after his Beverly Loan Co. in Beverly Hills, California, which has been in the family since 1938. His grandfather dealt in fine jewelry, his mother computerized the business and he has an entrepreneurial streak.
“I’ve expanded the business to two locations, and we also do a ton of art now, and we do flatware; we do wine — and handbags,” Tabach-Bank said in his California shop, not far from Rodeo Drive. He is finalizing plans for a third location, in Chicago.
His clients vary from one coast to the other.
“We get a lot of women in the financial community as well as men who bring in their wife’s or significant other’s handbags,” he said of his New York customers. “We get socialites and a lot more divorcees in Beverly Hills than New York.”
Tabach-Bank said people frequently take their Birkins or other valuables in and out of the pawnshop, using them like a credit card.
Condition is everything, he said. Does it come with a box? Does it have the dust bag? Does it have the clochette and the key?
“That’s very important,” he said. “And what color is it?”
Tabach-Bank prefers to loan against pristine Birkins and Kellys (the Birkin’s little sister named for Grace Kelly). They are worth about $4,000 to as much as six figures; they also have a high resale value.
The rare status of the bags has inspired highquality counterfeits.
“If you haven’t bought a fake, you haven’t been dealing in enough bags,” said Tabach-Bank, who is extra-cautious since once purchasing a fake. He said he can often tell a real from a fake by the weight of the bag — which, he stressed, is heavier than it looks.
Rivers bought her Birkin in Paris as a 50th-birthday gift to herself.
“That bag was my pride and joy,” she said.