Tower Clock of Brooklyn Building Are Ticking, and in Sync
The many months of planning, of disassembling and reassembling, of testing and retesting, had wound down to this scene: Alexander Krukis focusing on his BlackBerry, his nervousness and excitement seeming to increase with each passing minute.
“O.K., got one minute,” Mr. Krukis said on Wednesday.
That would be one minute until noon, or until time-telling would resume on Brooklyn’s most visible, yet unreliable, timekeeper: the tower clock atop the former Williamsburgh Savings Bank, at 512 feet the borough’s tallest building.
The clocks atop the old Williamsburgh Savings Bank building resumed telling time correctly on Wednesday. The building is now the 1 Hanson Place condominiums.Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
The four-faced clock had been out of commission since August 2006, when the Dermot Company, a real estate developer, began converting the building into condominiums, now known as 1 Hanson Place. Since that time, Mr. Krukis, the project manager for Dermot; Yury Vinokur, the building manager; and a machinist from Newark have spent countless hours getting the nearly 80-year-old building clocks all four of them in working order. Each clock’s face runs on an independent mechanism, and people often complained that the clocks displayed different times.
