89. Former New York Life Insurance Company Building

Location: 346 Broadway
Built: 1894-1898
Architect: Stephen D. Hatch (eastern section); McKim, Mead & White (western section)
National Register Number: 82003376
Listed: June 28, 1982
Visited: November 15, 2008
A.K.A.: The Clock Tower Building



I don't wear a watch. My last one inexplicably popped from my wrist--and off a moving train. Its suicide so shook me I vowed never to wear another. When I walk around the city now, it is in ignorance of the time. This is a pain when catching movies or showing up for dates, but miracurously, I am rarely late. I can get by with discreet peeks into stores, looking for working clocks, or furtive glances at people's watches. Public clocks are better bets, but they're pretty rare in New York City, rare once people realized in the sixties-seventies what a fucking pain in the ass they are to maintain.

Entirely mechanical, the clock atop 346 Broadway needs someone to manually wind it every eight days. It hadn't worked for twenty years until two city employees, Marvin Schneider and Eric Reiner, decided to give a damn and fix the thing, this in the era of the ungovernable city. The NYT: "'There was a foot of garbage up here,' Mr. Schneider recalled. 'A lot of the parts were missing; junkies had sold them. The glass faces were broken, which exposed the clock to all kinds of weather. Even the pigeons found the place repugnant.'” Today, Schneider is the city Clock Master, handling all the clocks on city property, thirteen in all, including seven in City Hall, plus the subject of dozens of New York Times profiles in addition to those just linked to--and why not, really? The job is so quaint, his story, so compelling.



The clock situation is currently assured, but the rest of the building's history hasn't been quite so straightforwardedly happy-ending. New York Life had its headquarters on this site starting in 1870; after the installation of a new-fangled Otis Elevator, two more stories were added. King's Handbook of New York City 1892 shows a lovely marble Italianate building with a high mansard roof. But the company kept growing, so in 1894, it hired Stephen D. Hatch to design an eastern extension (which is weird because the photo in King's Handbook shows it already extended down the block, but...whatever). Then, soon after he died, McKim, Mead & White were hired to replace the entire original building--no more mansard--with the Broadway front we see today.

A statue of Atlas used to top the clock tower, but disappeared around 1950 under mysterious circumstances. (The building looks incomplete without it.) Natural light used to bathe the insurance agents poring over their actuary tables on the south side of the building, but some jerk decided to replace some low-rise retail with a mid-rise apartment building block to its right. The lobby. Hmm. It was once quite grand, but by 1982 it had gotten all hoiked up with an added mezzanine for file storage. It may or not have been renovated. When I went there last week, it did not even occur to me to check. There was a cop and cop car on the corner, so I didn't even feel comfortable taking pictures of the thing from across the street. Even if he wasn't there, well, my default assumption for most downtown buildings is that NO, you CANNOT just walk through the front door for a look. If you try, some security guard will kill you, KILL YOU DEAD.