Chicago's public clocks are the physical heartbeat of the city

One reality of modern life is that people walking down a sidewalk tend to have their attention focused downward at their phones. Our lives exist inside those phones. But should they? Public clocks are a counterpoint to that idea, offering an invitation to disengage with our phones and re-engage with the physical world around us. Many are integral to buildings that were erected in the 1920s, including the clock tower at the Wrigley Building on Michigan Avenue, the bracket clock bearing a statue of Father Time at the Jewelers’ Building on Wacker Drive, the clock on the facade of the Chicago Board of Trade on Jackson Boulevard, and the twin bracket clocks at Marshall Fields — sorry, Macy’s — in the Loop. They no longer provide a vital public service, because time is always right there on our phones. Which is perhaps why there’s a tendency to walk by these clocks without even noticing them. “If we could just get out of our phones and look up, we would learn so much about our surroundings and our history and appreciate that,” said Suzanne Dirks. She’s based in New York City, where she recently gave a talk about public clocks. I gave her a call to see if any of her observations about New York were also applicable to Chicago. “These clocks speak to an older time and that just sparked this curiosity for me,” she said. “At first, you might only be able to think of a few. But I can guarantee if you just look, you’re going to see them everywhere. Of course they have a purpose, but they’re decorative and beautiful. They’re works of art. How did it get there? Who put it there? Why is it there?” What she found is that many public clocks started appearing around the same time. Until the late 19th century, time was determined locally. But the concept of standardized time was first introduced across the U.S. and Canada thanks to the railroads, and in 1918, standardized time became the law of the land. “It created the idea of people having to ‘share’ time,” Dirks said. “And these clocks that went up were strategically placed throughout cities, becoming focal points. A lot of banks had them as symbols of reliability and trust. Businesses, like jewelry stores, would put up a clock as a form of advertising. The Marshall Field’s clock is a really good example of businesses becoming a part of this community of time-keeping and providing a service. The clocks were in a lot of public-facing spaces because not everyone had a watch. A watch was a luxury item. But public clocks were — and still are — for everyone.” As cities grew, she says, “we adopted this idea that every minute counts. We started to measure time and there is this importance of what we do with our time and coordinating that.” To the point where time is no longer our own. It is dictated to us. Imposed on us. “If time is in your face, it can be a little stressful,” Dirks acknowledged. “What am I doing with my time? Do I have enough time? “I really like to think about time. Yes, it’s about these clocks as physical relics. But I also think of clocks as physical heartbeats of a city. They’re a quiet presence and I think about what they’ve seen. The change that has occurred around them over the past 100 years. Why are they still here? Who deemed that important? And also, what’s not here?” Chicago has several clock towers. The Encyclopedia Britannica Building, aka the Reid Murdoch Building, on LaSalle Street. Dearborn Station in the South Loop. The Pullman Clock Tower at 111th and Cottage Grove. Other clocks are affixed to a structure, like the clocks at Union Station, or the clock that adorns the archway into Little Village. And there are entities that still want clocks on or near their buildings. There’s one above the entrance to Tiffany & Co. on Michigan Avenue that’s fairly new — from 1997 — that was made by Electric Time Company, which is based in a suburb of Boston. “We made the clock for Tiffany’s in New York in 1941 and just restored it,” said Thomas Erb. He is the president of Electric Time Company, which has been making clocks since the 1930s. “Tiffany’s always had a clock with a statue of Atlas holding the world.” The version in Chicago is similar. How was everyone synchronizing their clocks a hundred years ago? Western Union partnered with an entity called the Self Winding Clock Company, and they would send out a signal indicating the time — for a fee — from a master clock at the U.S. Naval Observatory. “Jewelers would buy the signal, or newspapers, just to have an accurate time,” said Erb. If the Wrigley Building were built today, the cost of the clock would be around $50,000 or $60,000 per clock face, he said. “It’s almost a rounding error when you see the cost of these buildings today. The last huge clock we did was a 30-foot clock in Bangkok for their new train station, and that was a couple of hundred thousand dollars. We just did a reproduction of the clock at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. There’s a clock in Padua, Italy, that we just made for another client. We did a clock for the Grove at Farmers Market in Los Angeles. We call our clocks our kids and we go visit them.” And when he travels, for business or pleasure, he goes clock-spotting. “You better believe it.” Erb said his company also does a good deal of business in Chicago. The clock on the Wrigley Field manual scoreboard is theirs. “What I was told was that when the Chicago Bears started playing there, it was a requirement that they have an analog clock, so they added it in the ’30s or ’40s. So that’s been our clock for a long, long time.” There’s a famous Norman Rockwell painting from 1945 called “The Clock Mender,” depicting a man sitting atop a step ladder, adjusting the hands on one of the clocks at Marshall Field’s. I tried, unsuccessfully, to find out if there are clock masters in Chicago who still perform maintenance on these public clocks. In the end, it may be less complicated. The Board of Trade, for example, doesn’t have “one dedicated keeper of the clock,” I was informed, but instead takes a multi-pronged approach: Each department on site handles an area, be it facade cleaning, engineering or electrical. Are there any unique challenges to maintaining a clock that’s exposed to the elements, especially through Chicago’s seasonal extremes? Erb said no. The innards of most public clocks are electric now anyway: A computer synced to GPS. And if the power goes out? “When the power comes back on, the clock knows when it stopped and sets itself to the accurate time. Whereas mechanical clocks require a lot of work to maintain and I don’t know if there are any left in Chicago.” The thing about analog clocks — with their round faces and two hands — is that they’re unreadable to younger people who have always relied on digital clocks instead. “Something that influenced my understanding of clocks was when I learned there’s a clock test for dementia,” said Dirks. “They have you draw the face of a clock, and if you can’t do that in a way that makes sense — where the numbers go and all of that — that’s an indication that something is going on. I wonder, for the future, if this clock test will endure?” She’s recently teamed up with Tom Bernardin, who is the founder of an organization called Save America’s Clocks, and is planning to help reinvigorate and update his website at clocks.org. Bernadin became interested in public clocks several years ago after working with a fellow preservationist in New York named Margot Gayle. “She got me hooked. I live in Greenwich Village and there is a very important building here called the Jefferson Market Courthouse, which is now a library. It’s an old Victorian building with a clock tower, it’s gorgeous. The city wanted to tear it down and Margot saved it by getting the clock working.” The clock had not been functional for some time, and the fact that she was able to get the clock back into service created enough momentum and energy for people to rally around saving the building itself. “From there, she was abl