For eleven years, the clock on the corner building stopped at 4:17. On Saturday, it started ticking again. At exactly noon, a small crowd gathered on Church Street went quiet as the minute hand jumped forward for the first time since 2015, followed by a long round of applause, a few cheers and at least one person who said out loud, “Well, I’ll be.”
A team of eight volunteers raised $48,000 and restored the movement by hand. The work took two winters, hundreds of hours and a surprising amount of detective work in the city archive. The result is a clock that keeps time to within a few seconds a week, according to the volunteers, and a landmark that once again does the job it was built to do.
A landmark frozen in time
The clock was installed in 1896 on the corner tower of what was then a dry goods store and is now home to a bank branch on the ground floor and offices above. Its four faces, each about six feet across, can be seen from much of Church Street and from several blocks down the hill toward the lake.
Thanks for explaining this so clearly.
Great reporting — please keep following this story.