WATCH MAN: Building manager Yury Vinokur shows how he springs the clock forward in the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower.
STILL TICKING: The clock on the tower dates to 1929 and is still set by hand, unlike, say, Grand Central’s clocks. (
)
It wasn’t some computer that sprang Brooklyn’s most iconic clock forward an hour at 2 this morning — it was Yury Vinokur lending a helping hand.
Five hundred feet above Flatbush Avenue, in a cramped room at the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower, the building manager manually cranked the gears forward for daylight saving time — upholding a mostly uninterrupted 84-year-old borough tradition.
“Even in this day and age, there’s still use for us,” said Vinokur, 30.
Unlike at Grand Central Terminal, whose clocks went automatic more than a decade ago, there’s no satellite connection from Fort Greene to the world clock in Greenwich, England.
Instead, Vinokur simply eyeballs the time on his cellphone and adjusts the hands on each of the clock’s four faces, which all have separate motors and parts.
Outside, the clock’s aluminum hands — the hour hand is 9 feet long and the minute is 12-foot-6 — move in step with his very human effort.
“Verizon time,” he joked.
But making sure the clock keeps time is no laughing matter.
“If the clock is off, people will come in and tell us, ‘Your clock was off, and I was late for work,’ ” he said.
The drab equipment room is a far cry from the elegant terra-cotta clock faces, which at 27 feet in diameter and around 500 feet up are larger and higher than those on London’s Big Ben tower.
Behind each face are two 500-pound iron plates that hold the clock’s guts in place. Affixed to the interior plate is a motor and a small “set clock,” which was Vinokur’s guide as he changed the time this morning.
To change the hour, he used a custom steel socket wrench to separate the motor from the gears, enabling him to turn the hands from inside the tower.
“It’s essentially your wristwatch — only much, much bigger,” Vinokur explained.
The clock’s parts are original, dating to the building’s construction in 1929, but the 110-volt electric motors were rebuilt when it was refurbished in 2008.