The Park Clock

Apr 18, 2024

The clock on the hill in front of the Conservatory is back in working order. I’d gotten used to seeing its empty, handless face but recently noticed that the hands were back on and moving. I asked a gardener about it and she said that it had been repaired; apparently there’s a repairperson who specializes in these kinds of outdoor clocks. (I really want to talk to that person if anyone knows who it is!)

This got me curious about the clock, not to mention the idea of having a timepiece in a place that in every other way beckons you to lose track of time.

Of course, sundials have long been a feature in gardens and public spaces, but more as a symbol of time’s passage than as precise timekeepers. Sundials, which track the position of the sun in the sky, take a measure of nature’s time while clocks are geared, literally, to a human construct of time. Clocks embody a more rational, industrial ethos.

Given the pastoral vision that inspired the design of Golden Gate Park, it seems fitting that the first timepiece there was a sundial, not a clock. Sometime around 1890, then park-superintendent John McLaren installed a ginormous sundial at the front of the Conservatory, park historian Christopher Pollack told me. It was 60 feet in diameter with a 50-foot-tall gnomon, the projecting triangle that depicts the time by casting a shadow.

Views of the sundial in 1890. 1892, 1893 and 1900 (photos courtesy of OpenSFHistory)

Pollack wasn't sure how long the sundial was kept there. “I don't think it was terribly long, because they kept changing the valley.”

The next timepiece was installed in 1962. This one was an actual clock, gifted to the city by the Watchmakers of Switzerland and the Retail Jewelers of San Francisco and reportedly “symbolizing to free men the exchange of ideas and world trade.” (That’s according to an article in the “California Horticultural Journal” by John McKelvey, supervising gardener of that section of the park.) The clock was 15 feet in diameter with hands seven feet long. This being a Swiss clock, there was even a second hand. Some 8,000 plants were used to create the clock face, including the numerals. None could be more than 7 inches high, lest they be guillotined by the sweeping hands.

(Photo by Robert Myrick, California Horticultural Journal, January, 1968)

It’s not clear when that clock went by the wayside -- or why, though it may be for the same reason many other things in the park disappear. According to McKelvey, “the fascination of the moving hands leads to frequent acts of vandalism.”

In 2003, the latest timepiece was installed, a gift from the Fisher family.

This clock is less whimsical with its concrete numerals and sparse floral decorations. It too has had its problems, according to Pollack. The mechanism sticks up above the soil, making it vulnerable to vandalism. It was dismantled a few years ago and only recently repaired.

San Francisco was actually pretty late to park clocks. In many other places they were installed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as part of a landscaping trend known as carpet bedding: planting flowers in fantastic ornamental patterns and designs. That style of garden design had been used in private estates for centuries (think Versailles), but then according to an article in Arnoldia, ”it jumped the walls of the aristocratic gardens and found a home in public parks on both sides of the Atlantic.” (I’ll write about the way carpet bedding was used in the park in another post.)

The mania for carpet bedding led to some extraordinary park clocks: