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The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition -- January 8, 1998
A post clockBy WILLIAM M. BULKELEY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Their time has come, again.
Not so long ago, public clocks appeared doomed in the U.S. Inexorably, they faded from view, replaced with faceless digital readouts on modern facades -- or with nothing at all. The watchless were left to their own devices.
People like Peter Sonnabend, vice chairman of
the Sonesta Hotels chain: "I'm one of the great unwatched,"
he says. "I have to rely on the kindness of strangers and public
clocks." Or Boston preservationist Jane Holtz Kay, who laments the
disappearance of clocks in her Back Bay neighborhood. Public clocks, she
says, are a kind of "street furniture. God is in those kinds of details."
But public timepieces -- the predigital, often
whimsical variety -- are making a comeback. In places like Battle Creek,
Mich., where Kellogg Co. has commissioned a large musical clock featuring
Tony the Tiger and Snap, Crackle and Pop of Rice Krispies fame. When the
clock strikes the hour, the characters dive into a large bowl of sculpted
milk.
On New York's Madison Avenue, where watch-dealer
Tourneau Inc. just installed a time machine, 11 feet in diameter, with
a moon-phase predictor and 27 different clock faces that indicate the
time in cities around the globe.
Even at a Las Vegas casino, the Santa Fe, which
recently broke with gambling's timeworn anticlock tradition (based on
a sense that clocks, and windows for that matter, might distract from
the slot machines at hand) and hung an elaborate four-face, verdigris
Edwardian reproduction over the bar.
In the 1960s, the most common new clocks were
spare, digital time-and-temperature illuminations on banks. But today,
"digital is dead," says Thomas Erb, president and owner of Electric
Time Co., of Medfield, Mass., which built the $900,000 Tourneau timepiece
and claims to be the nation's biggest maker of public clocks. "You
can get a $7 watch that's more accurate," says Mr. Erb, "but
street clocks have become very popular." He says business has doubled
in the past five years.
Why the about-face? "People are trying to
get back a sense of community and a town center, and clock towers do that,"
says Lisa Reindorf, a Boston architect who designed a new clock tower
to renovate an aging Rhode Island strip mall.
Then there is the renewed interest among city
planners and architects in smaller-scale pedestrian areas, where analog
clocks fit in neatly. In time, commercial architects and landlords hope,
a clock will transform their buildings from storefronts to landmarks.
For a new shopping center, Hulbert Group International, a West Vancouver,
B.C., firm, had Electric Time create a clock that shows phases of the
moon and wind speed as well as the time. "The intention was to get
people to say, 'I'll meet you at the clock,' " says Steve Best, project
architect.
The once-popular digital displays proved costly
to power -- as much as $1,000 a year. And "they're cold and impersonal.
They don't have any style to them," complains Thomas Bartels, executive
director of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors in
Columbia, Pa., whose membership has grown 17% to 35,000 in the past five
years.
Time in a Vacuum
Analog clock aficionados argue, moreover, that
digital readouts leave time in a vacuum. "With a traditional clock,
the time is recognizable at a glance. You get a sense of time forward
and back without doing subtraction," says John DeFazio, a Hightstown,
N.J., architect who designed the Tourneau clock installation.
The coming millennium is also fueling interest
in public time displays.
Back then, public clocks were functional, as well
as attractive. Mill owners bought clocks with bells that would tell workers
when to return from breaks and when to quit for the day. Watches were
the privilege of the middle class, and most workers didn't own timepieces.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, tower clocks
became a major civic investment both here and abroad. Seth Thomas Co.,
namesake of Thomaston, Conn., and E. Howard Co. of Boston, employed hundreds
of clockmakers assembling gears, weights, escapements, clock faces and
movements for tower clocks. The public-clock business later dwindled as
cheaper electric motors replaced the complicated works of mechanical clocks
in the 1930s.
To Chime or Not to Chime
Ironically, the semiconductor chip has played
a role in the revival of analog public clocks by eliminating much of the
labor involved in maintaining them. Clocks now include battery-powered
chips that automatically reset the clock after electrical power outages.
They can be programmed to make the clock spring ahead and fall back for
daylight-saving time. "You can even program them to chime any hours
you wish, or not chime" when people are sleeping, says David Todd,
a clock specialist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, who thinks
the clocks are regaining popularity because "they're an anchor to
a slightly more benevolent world."
Real clock fans would like to turn back the hands
of time to fully mechanical clocks. Linda Balzer heads the clock-restoration
operations of Balzer Clock Co. in Freeport, Maine, which has been restoring
as many as 10 tower clocks a year and recently restored a 22-foot-diameter
clock at the Ayer Mill in Lawrence, Mass., for $110,000. She says: "When
you replace a mechanical clock with an electric one, you're not putting
in a better system. Properly maintained, a mechanical clock will last
500 years." (The world's oldest working clock, in Salisbury Cathedral
in England, is more than 600 years old.)
Mr. Erb of Electric Time admires Balzer's work,
but for towns that don't have restorable antiques, he creates "elegant"
reproductions. One of them, designed for street corners, sits atop a tall,
fluted column. A replica of a Seth Thomas design, it features an intricate,
cubical clock case with four faces and miniature lion heads set at each
corner. Unlike the original cast-iron designs, Electric Time's posts and
cases are made of aluminum, which is less likely to rust or crack.
Such reproductions attract people like Edna McCall,
a flag-store owner in Crystal Lake, Ill., outside Chicago, who headed
a town committee administering a fund left by a resident to do "something
for the town." The committee spent several million dollars buying
and refurbishing an old theater as an arts center.
Then it spent some remaining funds on a $30,000,
20-foot-high post clock from Electric Time. "Not everyone will benefit
from the theater," she says, "but all the people will benefit
from the clock."
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