Bogardus Plaza Clock
📍 New York, New York
New York City's only hand-wound sidewalk clock — a 1,500-pound, 17-foot cast-iron tower clock built in 1910 for a Michigan jeweler, rescued decades later and installed in Tribeca's Bogardus Plaza, where volunteers still wind it by hand every week.
The only hand-wound clock left in the city
The clock at Bogardus Plaza, where Chambers Street, Hudson Street, and West Broadway meet in Tribeca, is believed to be New York City’s only mechanical, weight-driven sidewalk clock still running by hand rather than electric motor. At 1,500 pounds and roughly 17 feet tall, the cast-iron tower clock is wound weekly, the old-fashioned way, by volunteers from the Friends of Bogardus Plaza and serviced by the city’s official clock master.
From a Michigan storefront to Tribeca
The clock was originally installed outside a jeweler’s shop in Lansing, Michigan, in 1910. Decades later it was acquired and restored by a clock collector in Ontario, Canada, then transported and reinstalled in its current spot when Bogardus Plaza was completed in 2020, a gift to the city from the nonprofit Friends of Bogardus Plaza.
Named for a cast-iron pioneer
The plaza takes its name from James Bogardus (1800–1874), an inventor and architect who pioneered cast iron as a building material and, in 1849, built what’s considered the first cast-iron building in the country at the nearby corner of Washington and Murray Streets. Two of his surviving cast-iron buildings still stand a short walk away, at 75 Murray Street and 85 Leonard Street. The plaza’s thirteen granite “eggs” are a nod to the neighborhood’s earlier life as Manhattan’s wholesale “Butter and Egg” district.
Visiting
The plaza sits right at the Chambers Street subway complex (A/C/1/2/3), making it an easy stop while exploring Tribeca. There’s no cost and no set hours — the clock is simply part of the streetscape, ticking away on its own mechanical time.
Sources:
🐿️ Cinnamon was here
Field report
A traveler wrote to me about "the last remaining hand-wound sidewalk clock" in a place called Tribeca, and that phrase alone got my tail twitching — a clock that still needs somebody's arm every week, in a city full of clocks that don't need anybody at all.
It turned out to be a seventeen-foot, 1,500-pound cast-iron tower clock, built in 1910 for a jeweler's storefront in Lansing, Michigan, rescued by a collector in Ontario decades later, and installed here in 2020 — named for James Bogardus, the inventor who built the first cast-iron building in America two blocks from this very spot. I counted the thirteen granite "eggs" set into the plaza, a nod to the neighborhood's old butter-and-egg wholesale days, and sat on one disappointed all over again that "egg" meant "rock" and not "snack." A volunteer from Friends of Bogardus Plaza cranked the mechanism by hand while I watched, both of us pretending it wasn't a little moving.
Everyone who stopped agreed on one thing: nice that something in this city still runs because a person bothered. My verdict — visit on a weekend morning, when the winding tends to happen, and give the volunteer a nod. Costs nothing, and for once nobody made me pay in acorns.
— Cinnamon 🐿️
📸 Cinnamon's camera roll
Snapshots from our very good boy on the road.
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