Faces of Time.

The Clock Towers That Shaped Manhattan

The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower at 23 Madison Avenue was completed in 1909 and briefly held the title of the world's tallest building. Its four clock faces, each measuring 26 feet in diameter with hands weighing half a ton apiece, were modeled on the Campanile di San Marco in Venice — a deliberate act of corporate theater designed to tell the residents of the Flatiron District that their insurance company was the most powerful institution in the Western world. The tower's bell chimes on the quarter hour; for decades, those chimes set the rhythm of the entire neighborhood. The building's construction displaced the original Madison Square Garden and altered the skyline of lower Manhattan permanently. Today, most people who pass it on Park Avenue South look at their phones instead.

Farther downtown, the Consolidated Edison clock tower at 14th Street and Irving Place has governed the east side of Union Square since its completion in 1895 — though the ornate pyramid roof was added during a 1928 redesign by Henry Hardenbergh, the same architect who built the original Waldorf Hotel and the Plaza. The tower's four faces are lit at night from within, and on foggy evenings the glow bleeds into the sky above Union Square in a way that has changed nothing in a hundred years. In Brooklyn, the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower at One Hanson Place stood as the borough's tallest building from its 1929 completion until 2009. Its clock faces — each 27 feet across — were once the most visible landmarks in all of Brooklyn. The interior banking hall beneath the tower is finished in Byzantine mosaics and marble, designed to make depositors feel their savings were being held in a cathedral.

There is a third category of NYC clock tower that almost no one notices: the civic towers repurposed for entirely different lives. The Jefferson Market Library clock tower at Sixth Avenue and West 10th Street was built in 1877 as part of a courthouse complex designed in High Victorian Gothic by architects Calvert Vaux and Frederick Clarke Withers. By 1945 the courthouse had been shuttered and the neighborhood campaign to save the building lasted twenty years. In 1967 it reopened as a branch of the New York Public Library, the clock restored to working order by a group of Greenwich Village residents who refused to let their landmark disappear. A StoryHunt through Manhattan's clock towers sends you to these facades to read what they really meant — not just the time, but the ambition, anxiety, and civic pride of the people who built them. The clues are carved into stone you walk past every day.