Colgate Clock (Jersey City)

The Colgate Clock (English Colgate Clock) is a freestanding, octagonal clock on the banks of the Hudson River in Jersey City, New Jersey (USA).

Description

The Colgate Clock is directly below the Goldman Sachs Tower opposite the Liberty State Park at approximately the same level of the Battery Park City in Manhattan. The clock has a diameter of 15 m, making it one of the largest clocks in the world. The surface of the Colgate Clock is 182.4 square meters. The minute hand has a length of about 7.5 m, the hour hand measuring 6 m.

Formation

The Colgate Clock, the front face pointing toward Manhattan, was built in 1924 and then replaced the 11.5 m diameter slightly smaller first Colgate Clock at about the same place. This original clock was developed in 1906 by the Colgate engineer Warren Day and constructed by the Seth Thomas Clock Company for the centennial of the Colgate Company. The octagonal format of the clock was there a reference to the successful octagonal soap from Colgate.

The framework of the first Colgate Clock consisted of structural steel, the front of the clock from strips and stainless steel strips. Originally the clock was part of an erected on the roof of an eight- story warehouse building at the southwest corner of York and Hudson Street, 11.5 meters high and about 60 m long line of text, its 6 meter high letters made ​​up the slogan " COLGATE 'S SOAPS AND PERFUMES ". The entire logo studded with 1,607 light bulbs whose total output of 28,000 watts made ​​it possible to see the signs over a distance of about 30 km nor of Staten Iceland and from the Bronx. Since then, the writing was for several decades for the prosperous success of the company Colgate. After replacing the original by the current clock 1924 the smaller original to Clarksville, Indiana, was transported to and installed on the roof of a resident subsidiary of Colgate- Palmolive Company.

In 1983, the letters " COLGATE 'S SOAPS AND PERFUMES " were removed and replaced by a toothpaste tube, which should apply the best selling product of the company. Two years later the headquarters of the company Colgate lack of space, from Jersey City to New York City, a large part was also laid to Kansas and Indiana. The entire, reaching about six blocks complex was demolished and then the clock implemented from the roof of the storage building as a freestanding structure to the ground far from the modern Goldman Sachs building, but without the toothpaste tube. With the construction of the Goldman Sachs Tower in the early 2000s, the Colgate clock had to be moved south to its present location a few meters away. As a monument of early soap industry it is today on an unused and partially overgrown plot of land that is waiting in the course of the conversion of the Jersey City Waterfront to a complete renovation and remodeling. What will happen with the clock, the current time is not yet in sight.

The clock as sight

The Colgate Clock is one of the most famous and popular attractions of Jersey City. As you can also see it very well from the West side of Manhattan, but include many Manhattan visitors to the monument erroneously New York.

At night, the entire clock including pointer is illuminated and can therefore be seen and read in the dark from the opposite side of the Hudson.

The clock immersed for several minutes in the movie Inside Man from 2006 on, in the scene where two of the main characters on the west side of Manhattan lead a longer conversation.