Joe Horak is not as widely known as, say, Bryant Gumbel, but he leads just as visible a professional life. He is an instrumentation electrician, and one of his duties is to make sure the Colgate-Palmolive Company’s clock keeps proper time. “If it doesn’t,” he says, “the switchboard at the company offices on Park Avenue is swamped with calls.”

This extraordinary public response to a timepiece stems from the fact that this is an extraordinary timepiece. “It’s the biggest clock in the world,” says Joseph Falasco, Colgate’s site manager in Jersey City, New Jersey, from whose shoreline the clock marks the passing hours for all lower Manhattan. “Well, I guess the Japanese have a bigger one, but it’s lying on its back. We can say that ours is still the largest singlefaced, vertically mounted clock on earth.” The Colgate clock is fifty feet in diameter; the minute hand is twentysix feet long, the hour hand nineteen and a half feet.

We are in the temporary offices of the company. All around us the massive Colgate manufacturing facility that has been in Jersey City since 1847 is disappearing. Colgate products are made in Jeffersonville, Indiana, now, and an office complex is going to replace the works. Back when people still made things around Manhattan and political bosses still ruled their fiefdoms with the unshakable authority of Jersey City’s Mayor Frank Hague, His Honor set the great clock running at noon on November 24, 1924.

From the start its movements were controlled by a smaller master clock, whose works, like those of its massive counterpart, were manufactured by the Seth Thomas Clock Company of Connecticut. For years the master clock sent out every three seconds a pulse of direct current that triggered the escapement and let the movement turn. “They always said the master clock was connected to the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington,” says Walter Merlin, who is the plant electrical engineer, “but I couldn’t prove it. There it is.” The master clock stands golden and incongruous against a cinder-block wall, the 230-pound pendulum disconnected and lying beside it.

“We shut it down when manufacturing here ended in 1987 and began running the big one off an electric timer,” explains Joe Horak, leading us across a sloping field of rubble past halfdemolished plant buildings. “It gives you a strange feeling. There used to be more than three thousand people working here. Now there are five of us.”

It’s one thing to be told of a fifty-foot clock face and another to stand underneath it. The huge bezel—designed by a Colgate engineer named Warren Davey in the shape of an octagon to honor the company’s Octagon soap—swells up into the radiant Indian-summer sky. Four stories up, the hands turn on their pivot. The minute hand is so large that you can easily see it traveling through the arc of its three-second jumps with the momentous, gently interrupted swing of a Ferris wheel.

Every Saturday Horak scrambles up the forty-odd feet of ladders that lead to the mechanism. The narrow metal rungs give the sense of being on a warship, and the nautical feeling is reinforced by stepping into the tidy shed at the top. Every surface is trimmed with neatly laid rope. “Jerry Conte did that,” says Horak. “He was a Navy man. Retired to Florida now—.” An urgent, startling whir interrupts him. “That’s the minor weights coming up. What you’re looking at is nothing more than a big cuckoo clock, and it’s all driven by weights. When those weights get down far enough, they trip a switch, and a DC motor pulls them back up.”

The smaller weights drive the escapement mechanism; they turn a worm gear that lets the larger mechanism advance. “The major weights—they’re 186 pounds—drive the hands of the clock.” The big gears were almost stilled forever a year ago, but in the end Colgate decided its marvel was too much a part of city life to demolish. Last summer, in a bravura piece of engineering, the company moved it, frame and all, from a warehouse roof to the riverfront, where people could continue to check it.

And they do check it; thousands of locals too jaded ever to spare a glance to the Statue of Liberty make sure the Colgate clock is doing its job each time they happen by. Outside on the platform the big hand drops and opens up a view of Manhattan through the four-inch stainless-steel slats that make up the clock face. The generous mid-October light has made the city look pink and white and utterly innocuous, but Horak knows better. A million windows are glittering across the Hudson, and every one of them contains a critic.