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Seattle, 'City of Clocks' Keeps on Ticking

If you’ve been to Seattle, Washington - or even just heard about it - you’d probably guess that its nickname is something like “The Space Needle City.”

That 184-meter-high tower, with an observation deck and restaurant, was built for the 1962 world’s fair there, and has become the city’s most famous landmark¹.

Or maybe Seattle is “The City Where It’s Always Raining.” That’s an exaggeration, as there are plenty of other U.S. cities that get more total precipitation. 

But elsewhere it often rains hard and then clears. Seattle gets long, drizzly² showers off the Pacific Ocean, sometimes with days of cloudy skies before and afterward³.

Seattle is also world-famous for its seafood⁴ - particularly salmon⁵ - caught in the ocean or fast-moving area rivers.

But the city’s nickname comes from none of these sources, and when you hear it, you’ll want an explanation.

Seattle is the “City of Clocks.”

Not alarm clocks or huge clock towers but street clocks. “Post clocks,” they’re sometimes called. 

There are still at least a dozen of what once numbered 55 or more of these large timepieces, weighing up to two tons, perched on cast-iron pedestals or columns on important downtown streets.

Most of these clocks served as ticking advertising⁶ testimonials for the jewelry⁷ shops that maintained them. 

So many were dark green that there’s even a color called “street clock green.” 

Others were red, in the faint hope that truckers would see and avoid them.

Among those still standing⁸, Benton’s Jewelers’ clock has four globe lamps; the clockworks inside Ben Bridge’s Jewelers’ post clock are encased in glass so all can see them; and the face of the clock in front of the Thomas Carroll jewelry store rests beneath four quaint⁹ carriage lamps.

Concerned about what it called “pedestrian circulation,” Seattle’s Board of Public Works came close to banishing¹⁰ street clocks in 1953, but a compromise was reached. 

If an owner promised to keep a clock running and accurate, and to clean it twice a year, it could stay. 

That soon drastically cut the number of clocks, but Seattle still has more than in all of vast New York City.

Whenever there’s a story about the old post clocks, Seattle’s newspapers can’t seem to resist a play on words.

“Time Will Tell,” a headline will read. 

Or, when one gets restored, “It’s About Time.” 

One Seattle historian mused¹¹ that the old public timepieces had wonderful stories to tell, “if only they could tock.”

As in . . . tick . . . tock.