The House with the Clock

It has already happened more than once that guests and deliverymen can’t find their way to my house. I will then get a call, wherein they will tell me with kind frustration as if somehow I’ve made life much more difficult than it needs to be, “I’m at the House With The Clock. Where are you?” The implication being, of course, that if only I had a house with a clock, like these sensible people, everyone’s lives would be easier.

I get other calls, too. Have you seen the House With The Clock? It looks like (you choose): a train station; something out of the Twilight Zone or James and the Giant Peach. What do you think about it?

Why not go to the source? Why not ask Ernest de la Torre, clock owner, whatever possessed him? What is the story behind the luminous, owly, knowing clock? This is what he said (more or less). “When I was drawing elevations of the front of the house for the renovation, I noted that there was a natural visual horizon line created from the peaks of the east and west roofs creating a void at the center of the house. I knew something needed to be there and the logical choices were a window, or a slatted roof vent. Then when I was driving back and forth to my Greenwich, Connecticut design project, I took notice of the 1930s stone gas stations along the Merritt Parkway. I was trying to figure out what made them so charming. Certainly the slate roof and stone block walls were appealing, but I realized it was the unique roof clock that was drawing my attention. After some research, I found that roof clocks have a history on 18th and 19th century Swedish houses, and I considered how well this ties to Kris’s ancestry. I proposed the idea to him, who delighted in the irony of a clock on our house (since he is rarely late and I, well… I run on Cuban time).

I researched companies that have experience with outdoor clocks—the last thing we wanted was a maintenance issue— and decided on The Electric Time Company in Massachusetts that has been making tower and roof clocks continuously since 1900. We have had the clock radio-controlled with a GPS interface so it will self-adjust for daylight savings time, thus saving us a broken neck from roof climbing.

We toasted the unveiling of the clock on New Year’s Eve, and I surprised Kris with a marriage proposal accompanied by a watch (in lieu of a ring, which we had already exchanged many years ago). I asked him “to spend the rest of time with me,” as an obvious reference to both the roof clock and the watch, and which cemented our endearment of this clock in our continuing life story. We hope our neighbors will enjoy their time and ours on their walks along Washington Spring Road.”

Just as an authorial aside, I can’t help but notice the echoes in Ernie’s story of another trip to the roof to announce the time, that of Winthrop Gilman’s and Charles Park’s, who famously risked their necks in a midnight snowstorm on New Year’s Eve in 1863, a hundred and fifty years earlier to the day, to joyously ring in the new year with the Presbyterian Church’s new bell, the only access to the bell tower at that time being by ladder onto the roof.

So what do I think about the clock? I think the clock is in perfect sync with, and a very symbol of, what it means to live and love in Palisades, that’s what I think.