I have a thing for Seattle’s clocks. The ones in the sidewalk that are about fifteen feet tall.
I’ve got this database of old photographs or documents indicating a clock in a place at a specific time. Basically, I’m building a four dimensional model of clocks.
Here is the heart of it. Three inventories of every clock in downtown Seattle. They were made in 1924, 1927, and 1928. I stumbled upon them a few years ago at the Seattle Department of Transportation while I was trying to look up street use permits. I never discovered how to see old permits, but after I left a city employee emailed me saying she had found a folder of old records. Pure gold.
Only the 1927 inventory included clocks outside of downtown. They all included a clock at the Japanese Commercial Bank that hung off the side of the building, and ’27 and ’28 included a similar clock at People’s Bank. Possibly those two clocks required a permit to hang out over the public right-of-way, as did the street clocks in the sidewalk. Other clocks downtown (for example on Colman ferry dock; King Street Station; Union Station) were not included, hinting at restrictive criteria.
The KML is now posted to Figshare as open data; if you do something interesting with it, please drop me a note.
Here is the original map in Google.
Further reading
- Where Seattle’s Street Clocks Were
- Street Clocks and Stacy Shown’s Showns
- Mayer Brothers in the Klondike
- The Curious Case of the Central School Clock
- Time to Daylight and Save Time in Seattle
- Time Travel to Pike’s Forest of Clocks
- Time Travel to West Seattle
- A Broadway clock that tells history, not time (on CHS)
- Blueprints of Seattle’s Clocks
- The original Seattle Clock Walk
- The City-Wide list on the clock walk site.