But before its last ticktock years ago — no one remembers exactly when — this four-sided clock used to greet shopkeepers every morning, send children running home for supper and remind drivers when to move their cars parked on the street. By night, it glowed with lights that illuminated the tenements and shops below.
“The first thing I saw when I came here was the clock,” recalled Steve Pabafikos, 49, who used it when he started to work in the area two dozen years ago. Today, he owns a diner in the shadow of the idle clock. “Now they leave it like that?”
The clock sits atop a narrow, 10-story tower on the Grand Concourse that is a city landmark and once housed the wood-paneled executive offices of the Dollar Savings Bank. Each of its hands on four white faces is frozen at a different time. In recent years a chunk blew off one face, leaving a dark hole.
Now as a new year approaches, one Bronx man is determined to give the clock a fresh start. The resident, Ivan Diaz, a real estate investor, said he had reached a deal to acquire the building and he planned to make it once again a centerpiece of the community. One of his first priorities, he said, will be to fix the clock.
“When a building like this starts to degrade and decay, other things start to fall apart, and we need to change that,” Mr. Diaz said.
The story of the clock is, not unlike that of the Bronx, one of declining fortunes. The tower was built in the early 1950s for Dollar Savings as an addition to the stately Art Deco building next door that served as its branch office. Dollar Savings later merged with another bank, and in the mid-1980s, the tower was sold to a real estate company, Jefferson Realty Associates, which leased it as office space to local businesses and agencies.
The tower changed hands again in 2005, when it was bought by Family Support Systems Unlimited, a social service agency that later closed amid financial difficulties. In recent years, the building has stood empty, shuttered with a metal grate at the entrance.
For many people, the clock has become a frustrating reminder of the Bronx’s struggles, and a testament to the difficulty of leaving its past behind. Some critics have charged that Bronx leaders are quick to take offense at old stereotypes of a crime-ridden Bronx, but seem to have overlooked a broken clock that sends a message for all to see that no one cares enough to fix it.
The novelist Avery Corman, who wrote “Kramer vs. Kramer” and grew up in the Bronx, said he noticed the hole in the clock while passing through the neighborhood in the spring and sent an email to the borough president, Rubén Diaz Jr. He received no response.
“Can you imagine Marty Markowitz standing around with the big Williamsburgh clock with a hole in it?” Mr. Corman said the other day, referring to the Brooklyn borough president and the former Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower in Fort Greene. “How long would that have been?”
John DeSio, a spokesman for Mr. Diaz, said that staff members of the borough president’s office had made inquiries about the clock and had toured the building in recent years; but they were told by the owner that repairing the clock would be costly and would require specialized parts and equipment not readily available. “Just because we didn’t send out a news release on something doesn’t mean we’re not aware and involved,” Mr. DeSio said.
The clock stopped working long before the building became vacant, local residents say, but it is not clear when or how that happened. Torrey Brooks, who had managed Jefferson Realty Associates, said the clock was always a challenge. When it broke, he said, it was impossible to find anyone with the expertise to fix it. And at night, there was another problem entirely.
“People would shoot at it because it was a big, round, lit-up target,” he said. “We had bullet holes.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 31, 2013
An earlier version of this article stated incorrectly that the Bronx building that is home to a broken clock became vacant in 2005. In fact, it is not clear when the building became vacant.
Yahoo Local News – New York Times
http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info/?p=19906
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