Gilroy’s centerpiece town clock is now right more than two times a day. It’s been a tough winter for those who want to keep time using the 1913 masterpiece of clock construction, which was frozen for months, then started up correctly and froze again.
Now, it’s working, wonderfully, on all four sides.
“Between all the shafts and gears there is a bit of play which makes some of the clock faces vary from each other,” said the city’s facility superintendent Walter Dunckel, who oversees all city-owned buildings, including the clock at the Old City Hall. “Adjusting the play out has the effect of binding the clock and stopping it from working. Due to the complexities and age of the clock, it is not as dependable as newer equipment might be. It sometimes stops moving during periods of rain for what appears to be no good reason.”
Here’s what you probably wouldn’t have guessed: the clock, which was made by the Seth Thomas Clock Co. in Thomaston, Connecticut, has to be wound twice a week with a giant hand crank. A city employee maintains it, but more complicated work is subbed out to an out-of-state clock maker. It used to be serviced by someone from Watsonville.
When the majestic City Hall building was built in 1905 with a clock tower but no clock, it was recognized by passersby on Highway 101 as something to see. Or in the words of a Gilroy Gazette article, the building was “begabled, beportholed, beturreted.”
Students were given the day off from school to watch the Nov. 22, 1905 opening of the Baroque and Mission Revival style building at Monterey and Sixth streets. “No other city in the county, except in San Jose, has so magnificent a building as this will be,” the Gazette wrote.
But the city had trouble affording the $700 for a clock to top it off in 1905. Then-Mayor George Dunlap started his version of crowdfunding, raising $200 from local donors, but the project languished until benefactor Catherine Hoxett covered the rest of the money eight years later.
The clock suffered serious damage in the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake but was refurbished by Watsonville-based machinist and clock hobbyist, Dan Houseman, and has been running with mixed results for some time.
A tour of the clock tower is like a walk through history, with some adventure thrown in.
The winding takes place in a closed off area on the third floor of the Old City Hall, where you can peer at pedestrians through round windows. Then, up one floor are the shafts and gears moved by a pendulum below. Further up, on a floor accessed by a wooden ladder, is a giant gear shaft and cables that connect all four faces.
Unfortunately, from up there, you can’t see the clock from the inside. You just see small wooden squares that the time-keeping cables run through. (Nothing like scenes from Michael Keaton’s Batman or Hugo, we had imagined.) The top is dusty and musty, the air reminiscent of the pigeons who frequented it before wire protectors were put up to keep them away.
