Wise Clock

If you stroll down to the eastern end of the beach boardwalk at Jacob Riis Park in Queens, you will encounter an incredibly polite, 20-foot-tall piece of history standing directly against the Atlantic breeze. Known affectionately as the Wise Clock, this four-sided street timepiece looks wonderfully out of place. That is because, for most of its life, it was.

Built by the Howard Clock Company in Boston in 1891, it spent its youth standing watch in front of William A. Wise and Son, a bustling Brooklyn jewelry store. It migrated across various busy street corners on Flatbush Avenue and Fulton Street before the jeweler folded in 1941, gifting the clock to the Department of Parks to begin its permanent seaside retirement.

Life on the beach, however, is not easy for a Victorian dandy. Over the decades, the relentless, salty ocean air worked its slow magic on the clock’s cast-iron base, rusting its internal gears and entirely stripping away its elegant gilded details. The clock eventually lost track of the time entirely and by the early 2000s, it stood as a beautifully weathered, silent sentinel of the boardwalk, looking more like a forgotten prop from a maritime stage play than a working municipal clock.

Fortunately, a meticulous restoration in 2018 whisked the clock away to Pennsylvania, where craftspeople painstakingly rebuilt its internal mechanisms and recast its lost ornamental leaves. To prepare it for the next century of coastal weather, they coated its pale-green frame in a specialized paint designed to resist abrasive blowing sand and installed tiny, hidden LEDs to light up its four faces at dusk. Returned to its sandy perch in June 2019, the Wise Clock now stands tall against the horizon once more, keeping immaculate time for the sunbathers and beachcombers of New York.