What it’s actually like
Fifth Avenue made its name on silver and turquoise. Truly Blessed Jewels, at 7058 East Fifth near the Marshall Way corner, is what the street’s jewelry trade looks like in the 2020s: bright, busy, gold-toned and participatory. Nobody here is behind a locked case explaining which mine a stone came from. Instead there is a counter where a staff member is welding a fine chain closed around someone’s wrist, a charm bar where a group of friends is building necklaces one pendant at a time, and racks of layering chains meant to be worn in the shower, at the pool and to dinner.
The brand belongs to Lisa Valenzuela, a self-taught designer who started it in 2012 after careers in dance teaching, catering and event sales, according to a 2024 JCK profile. She describes the look as California girl meets desert goddess, and the store matches: soft, feminine, made for photographs. The company says it employs more than thirty women and finishes its pieces locally, with chains and charms hand-selected from U.S. distributors.
The material is 14k and 18k gold-filled, which is the honest middle of the jewelry market: a thick layer of real gold bonded over a base metal, sturdier than plating and a fraction of the price of solid gold. That price point is what makes the experience work. A permanent bracelet or a built-to-order charm necklace is a gift you can buy for a whole bachelorette party without a second mortgage, and a lot of people do exactly that.
What to buy
A Linked for Life permanent bracelet. The signature. Choose the chain, hold out your wrist, and it is welded closed in a few minutes. Anklets and necklaces work the same way.
A charm necklace from the charm bar. Start with the chain, add initials, a birthstone, a small saint or a desert motif, and stop at three. Engraving is done on site.
Layering chains. The everyday stock: fine gold-filled necklaces in several weights, designed to be stacked and left on.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The store is at the western end of the Fifth Avenue curve, a short walk from the Bronze Horse Fountain at Marshall Way. Street spaces on Fifth go to the regulars, so use the public garage on the Fifth Avenue side near the canal or the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard and walk; the Old Town on foot note maps both, and the Downtown & 5th Ave guide covers the district.
Go early on a weekday for the weld. Permanent jewelry is a one-at-a-time service, and weekend afternoons in high season, January through April, bring groups who all want the same thing at the same moment. The store has run later hours Thursday through Saturday, which helps on ArtWalk nights, when Marshall Way’s galleries open a block away; confirm current hours before a special trip.
Bring the group, but bring a plan. It is a natural stop on a bachelorette weekend, and a party that has agreed on a chain before arriving gets in and out far faster than one that negotiates at the counter.
Eat while you’re there
Berdena’s and Herb Box share the 7051 East Fifth address a few doors west, one for coffee and one for a long lunch. Citizen Public House along Fifth is the gastropub with the famous chopped salad, and FnB in Craftsman Court is the dinner that turns a jewelry run into an occasion. Cartel Roasting Co. holds the far end of the street.
How it got here
Fifth Avenue was a jewelry street from the start. In 1950 the craftsmen burned out of the Arizona Craftsmen building at Brown and Main, Lloyd Kiva New and silversmith Wes Segner among them, cut a new street through farmland south of the canal and named it, with a wink, after New York’s. Through the 1950s its studios and shops sold handmade silver to winter visitors, and the Native jewelry dealers who settled along it, from Sewell’s a few doors east onward, made turquoise the street’s calling card for the next seventy years.
What the street sold changed with what visitors wanted. By the 2010s Old Town was filling with a younger crowd on long weekends, and the jewelry they wanted was not a collector’s squash blossom but something gold, delicate and personal that could be worn every day and photographed in the making. Permanent jewelry, the welded-on chain, became the retail ritual of the moment, and the charm bar followed it.
Truly Blessed was early to that shift. Valenzuela founded the brand in 2012 and built it around customization rather than inventory: the charm bar, the welded bracelet, engraving and piercing, all done in the room. The format traveled well enough that a second store opened in Newport Beach, California, in November 2024, carrying the same desert-meets-beach look back to the coast that inspired it.
The result is a store that sits comfortably beside its older neighbors rather than against them. The Native arts dealers on the curve still teach buyers about stone and smith; Truly Blessed sells the same basic pleasure, a piece of jewelry tied to a place and a day, at a different price and to a different generation. On a street named as a joke about luxury, it is a reminder that the joke always included people who wanted something beautiful they could actually afford.