On a chilly night in January, a group of six students had gathered in Midtown Manhattan for a class. Each one sat at a watchmaker’s bench, equipped with the tools, such as tiny screwdrivers, tweezers and magnifying loupes, needed to work on watch movements.
The class was Horology 101, a single-session lesson on movements and watchmaking tools offered regularly by the Horological Society of New York, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the appreciation of timekeeping. The students were all amateur watch enthusiasts — there was a lawyer, for example, and a senior producer at a video production company.
“We have a very diverse group of people coming to the classes,” said Nicholas Manousos, the organization’s executive director. “I think that’s because we really focus on being as accessible as possible to the public. We never turn anyone away — we welcome everyone who has an interest in horology.”
“That’s our claim to fame,” he added, “that everyone can come here and feel welcome.”
One of the students, Jenny Montgomery, who works in the film and television industry, said she had found the horological society site online as she was looking for a way to nurture her interest in watches.
“I was like, ‘Obviously, this is a perfect place to see what it’s about and try it out,’” she said as class ended.
History Lives On
When Ben Ahlers, the actor who plays Jack Trotter in the HBO series “The Gilded Age,” and Luke Harlan, one of the show’s producers, were preparing for the show’s second season, they attended the class too. (Mr. Ahlers’s character created an alarm clock mechanism that, in the third season, he sold for a tidy fortune.)
The series, set in the 1880s, called the society by the name it used at the time: the Uhrmacher Verein der Stadt New York, or Watchmakers’ Association of the City of New York.
“To see an organization like that not only existed,” but was “a functioning one that had classes is a pretty crazy,” said David Crockett, an executive producer for “The Gilded Age.”
“It is surprising that that history sort of lives on,” he added.
It almost didn’t.
In 2013, the society had only about 20 members, said Mr. Manousos, who joined in that year and has been its executive director since 2020. But through what he described as a combination of modernized marketing and a focus on its anchor offerings, including its Horology 101 through 104 classes and frequent lectures by watch brand founders, executives and experts, the organization now has about 2,000 members in more than 35 countries. (Membership includes priority access to videos of society sessions and subscriptions to several horological publications.)
The public’s increased interest in watches over the past decade has helped, too. “There has been this surge of interest, and the interest has been in more than just looking at watches,” said William Buchalter, the organization’s president. “When people are seeking out information and an unbiased perspective and education, they have found us that way.”
Industry figures note that the society has a knack for making the world of traditional watchmaking feel approachable rather than fusty.
“They’re very old — they’re very much an institution — but, my goodness, what they’re doing is done with such vigor,” said Nicholas Bowman-Scargill, the managing director of the British brand Fears Watches, who gave a lecture on “The Trials and Tribulations of Resurrecting a Family Watch Company” at the society in 2024 (his travel expenses were reimbursed). “It’s so relevant for the modern day.”
“You expect to walk in and there’s some 80-year old guy behind a dusty desk, kind of staring at you, going, ‘What do you want?’,” he said. “It’s not that at all: You go in and it’s young people; it’s energetic. There’s a real friendliness. Their approach to it is what really sets them apart.”
Now the society is preparing to celebrate its 160th anniversary at its annual gala, scheduled March 21 at the Plaza Hotel. Highlights are to include the presentation of a lifetime achievement award to François-Paul Journe, the noted independent watchmaker who lives and works in Switzerland, and an auction, conducted by Sotheby’s, to support the society’s scholarships and awards.
Mr. Ahlers is one of the gala co-chairs, joined by Danièla Dufour, an independent watchmaker and a daughter of Philippe Dufour; and Roger W. Smith, the well-known British independent watchmaker.
On the Road
The society was founded on March 26, 1866 as the Deutscher Uhrmacher Verein, or the German Watchmakers’ Society. (As Mr. Manousos put it, “Back then, if you were a watchmaker in New York City, most likely you were German” — as the trade was especially popular within the German immigrant community.)
It has had a number of names over the years, but has been using the Horological Society of New York since 1930.
For the past decade, it has been housed in a former school building on West 44th Street that is also the headquarters to other membership groups with deep roots: It shares a floor with the offices of the Society of Colonial Wars in the State of New York, the Society of Mayflower Descendants in the State of New York and the Huguenot Society of America, all founded in the late 1800s.
The society’s library, open to the public, has more than 25,000 items, including books, magazines, periodicals, pamphlets, postcards, advertisements and all manner of watchmaking ephemera. The core of the collection was donated to the society in 2022 by Fortunat Mueller-Maerki, a Swiss-born former recruiting executive who had amassed what the society has described as one of the largest privately held horological libraries.
There also is a quirky array of society-branded items for sale there, including its own perfume, called 1866 in tribute to the year the group was founded. Infused with notes such as tobacco, amber and orange blossom, it is $200 for a 50-milliliter bottle.
Mr. Manousos said the society’s 2025 budget totaled $2 million, primarily funded by memberships — there are three tiers, starting at $100 a year; proceeds from the gala; and class fees.
Spots in the classes — usually there are a couple of individual sessions in a typical week — frequently sell out quickly after they are listed on the group’s website. (Horology 101, for example, is $250, although full-time students and veterans can take the class free of charge.)
The society has played host to students from institutions such as New York University and the City University of New York and it held a class in September for a group from Breakfast with Our Boys, a nonprofit enrichment program for preteen and teenage boys. Afterward, several of the participants said they wanted to return, said Randall E. Toby, the group’s founder, adding that one asked about the logistics becoming a professional watchmaker.
“These are questions I don’t think would have ever been asked if we hadn’t partnered with them,” he added.
The Horology classes go on the road too: They have been taught in cities such as Los Angeles, Singapore, Denver, Hong Kong and London.
“We’ve got a classroom that fits in a suitcase that you can check on an airplane,” Mr. Manousos said with noticeable pride.
Supporting Study
A significant part of the society’s budget supports its scholarship program, which distributed $160,000 in 2025. The 2026 scholarship budget, however, has tripled, thanks mostly to a $470,000 donation from the Vogt Foundation in San Francisco.
In the past scholarships were available only to U.S. students attending watchmaking schools in America.
But now scholarships such as the Andre Bibeau Scholarship for Veteran Watchmaking Students, named for a World War II veteran and the longtime owner of a watch repair shop in Waterbury, Conn.; and the Grace Fryer Scholarship for Female Watchmaking Students, named for a New Jersey woman who championed fellow female workers after she herself was poisoned by the radium that they used to create luminous watch dials, are available to foreign students in the United States, as well as those students studying watchmaking abroad.
The society accepts donations from individuals and corporations: Its supporters include watch brands such as Grand Seiko, Vacheron Constantin, Piaget and MB&F.
Still, the society is adamantly brand agnostic. “We need to remain neutral,” Mr. Manousos said. “We need to make sure that everyone is part of what we’re doing.”
That nonpartisan approach, combined with its primarily educational focus, seems to be an intrinsic part of the group’s appeal to the watch industry.
“They allow the viewing of watches through a large prism, not through a narrow viewpoint, not through a keyhole,” said Yoni Ben-Yehuda, the head of watches for the retailer Material Good, who in March 2025 gave a society lecture on how to acquire hard-to-procure watches. “They look at the business of watches; they look at watchmaking; they look at vintage watches; they look at different innovations; they look at different brands.
“It’s very easy to want to partner with them and support them, because what they do is important.”
The post From the ‘Gilded Age’ to Today, a Watch Society at 160 Years appeared first on New York Times.
