The Waldorf Astoria New York reopened to guests in July after an eight-year, multi-billion-dollar renovation. And one of its oldest ornaments had been refurbished too: the eight-foot-tall wedding cake of a clock that has been a fixture of the luxury hotel’s lobby for more than a century.
The timepiece, commissioned by Queen Victoria for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, was produced by the Goldsmiths & Silversmiths Company of London with silver plate relief portraits of six U.S. presidents and topped later with a gilt reproduction of the Statue of Liberty. The style “epitomizes late 19th-century Victorian design,” according to Nigel Thomas, the director of restoration at Stair Restoration in Craryville, N.Y., the furniture specialist that repaired the clock’s cabinetry and decoration.
A thorough cleaning was part of the renovation plans for the clock, which was an attraction in the hotel’s original Fifth Avenue location and then moved during the hotel’s shift to its current Park Avenue site in 1931. But so was reinforcing its structural integrity.
“Someone had cut one of the main parts of the clock off,” Mr. Thomas said. “How it didn’t fall over, I don’t know.” He said there was no record of when the alteration had happened nor why — and while he did not know a specific name for the part that had been removed, he said it had contributed to the “structural integrity of the central part of the clock.”
The Stair team also attended to damage caused by less dramatic alterations, such as holes drilled near the top of the clock to mount lights; (again, Mr. Thomas said no one knew when the holes had been made).
A five-person team worked on the cabinetry and decoration for more than six months, beginning in 2019 and ending the following year. Removing, cleaning and restoring the patina of the floral and curlicue ormolu decorations that cover much of the clock’s cabinet was the most labor-intensive job, Mr. Thomas said, requiring “days and days and days” of work.
But the goal was not to return the decoration to its original state. Too glossy a restoration “destroys so much history and all the patina,” Mr. Thomas said, so the objective was a “well cared for, well looked after” appearance.
While Stair worked on the exterior, the movement was refurbished by Sean Kane of About Time Restorations in the Higganum section of Haddam, Conn. A patchwork of parts from different makers was inside.
According to a 1960 issue of the Bulletin of the National Association of Watch & Clock Collectors, the clock’s original mechanical movement was replaced around that time with an electrical one made by Elgin, an American brand whose name now appears on each of the clock’s four dials. (The bulletin, however, did not specify when the change was made.)
And, Mr. Kane said, “the switches and controls” he discovered inside were made by the Electric Time Company, a Massachusetts specialist in tower and street clocks.
When he got to work, Mr. Kane said, “there wasn’t a whole lot of original anything left” or historic record to follow, but he set about “rewiring everything and redoing the controls.”
The work on the clock was completed long before the hotel was ready to receive it. (What had been planned as a two-year closure stretched to eight because of unexpected construction issues and the Chinese government, which in 2018 assumed control of the hotel’s most recent owner, Anbang Insurance Group; it was not interested in accelerating the work.)
So in November 2020, the refurbished clock went on view at the New York Historical, a museum dedicated to American history, where it remained until it was returned to its usual position in the lobby’s Peacock Alley area in time for the reopening.
Despite the clock’s location in a luxury hotel where rooms start at $1,500 a night, Matthew White, the author of the forthcoming book “New York Minute: Public Clocks that Make the City Tick,” said people should remember that such clocks initially were intended to be used and appreciated by everyone.
“Even if they were made by the richest company or purchased by the richest family, they were still for the public,” Mr. White said, adding that the hotel’s clock “is a gift to the city.”
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