Iconic Bromo Seltzer Is Telling Time Once Again For Baltimore

BALTIMORE (WJZ) -- The hands of time move again on a Baltimore icon. The Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower clock has undergone renovation for years and now the time of moving again high above in downtown Baltimore.

Marcus Washington has an inside look at the work to get things moving. These are one of those sights you don't get to see often, but here we are some 200 plus feet inside the clock.

It's the reveal of years of work after time literally stood still.

"And today is the big day we put the hands back on the building," says Tony Azola, with Azola Building Rehab. Work on the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower clock began in 2015, after the motor the runs the clock died a few years prior.

"The hands stopped working essentially, all four of them. And once we took it apart and realized the damage that was done, it just made sense to have the whole thing restored and rebuilt," says Azola.

And that's where Balzer Family Clock Works out of Maine, comes in to restore the rare clock.

"We're very familiar with how it was designed, but this is a very large time piece, so the proportions were a bit different, so we had to engineer all that, but it was such a joy to get it back the way it was originally designed to run," says Linda Balzer.

The tower was a centerpiece of the city once construction was complete in 1911 of the then-Emerson Tower, which was also the tallest building in the city at the time.

Fast forward 106 years later and the clock is going back to how it originally operated, but with less weight of all the clocks hands.

"So we've dropped 717 pounds of weight, so that clock is not going [to have to] work as hard," says Rick Balzer.

"And to give you an idea of how large and light the new hands of the clock are, the largest one, which is the minute hand, is about 12 feet long and it's so light I can move it with one finger. And that's how it works."

"It's a weight driven pendulum regulated timepiece, meaning that the weights, or gravity, is the power source for the clock."

A clock that will move the hands of time once again, overlooking Charm City also comes with an automatic wind system environmentally friendly, gravity is a power source

Repairing the clock is part of phase two of the tower's renovations, which will cost nearly $4.4 million dollars.

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