When you’ve been in the jewelry business as long as Paul Hartquist has, you end up making a lot of couples’ engagement rings. And then engagement rings for the children of those couples.

And when you’ve been in the jewelry business as long as Paul Hartquist has — which, to be clear, is more than 43 years — you realize it’s not the rings themselves that are important but the people wearing them.

“It’s not so much doing the work, working on rings; I burned out on that long ago,” he said. “I’m helping people with jewelry that I met literally 40-plus years ago. …I’ve met a lot of wonderful people. Many of my customers have become friends.”

After apprenticing for seven years under Robert Moeller at his eponymous jewelry shop in Highland Park, Hartquist opened his own shop in what would become the Alliance Bank Center in 1989. When the building abruptly closed this spring, with tenants initially given just 48 hours to vacate, Hartquist hopped across the skyway to the Town Square building.

It was not ideal timing. Hartquist plans to retire at age 70, in a few years. He wasn’t interested in being forced to shutter his business before that point — especially not on such short notice — but he also doesn’t plan to be working for as many more years as it would take to reestablish himself sustainably elsewhere.

“It was a little chaotic and disturbing at first, but I landed on my feet,” he said. “If I was 10 or 20 years younger, I probably would have moved out into the suburbs.”

In Hartquist’s early days, the flow of people through the skyways was constant. But it’s been a steady decline since then, he said. Among his concerns: Too much street-level parking has been removed to make way for bike paths and the light rail. Some large companies have moved their headquarters out of downtown. Foot traffic is down substantially since the pandemic.

Hartquist is of two minds about the state of the skyway system today. On the one hand, his shop is tucked away at the end of a hallway, the final storefront before a “condemned” sign blocks what would’ve been the bridge to his old stomping grounds in the Alliance Bank building.

“Being here, it’s difficult for customers to access me,” he said. “They have to go out of their way; they have to want to see me.”

On the other hand, his business model is no longer one that relies on passersby. Decades ago, he said, women might stop in during their lunch hour and buy a necklace or a pair of earrings. But gold prices have jumped substantially over the years and people wear less jewelry than they once did, he said.

So now, he relies more on repeat customers and personal referrals than the daily walk-in business that sustains — or is unable to sustain — lunch counters and cafes around the skyways.

“Let’s say someone wants something done for a ring,” he said. “If they only come into work one day a week, well, that’s fine. They’ll come see me that one day. But if you’re in a food court, something like that, they need to sell food every day of the week in order to survive. So a lot of the vendors are suffering.”

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