Colgate Clock (New Jersey)

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Coordinates: 40°42′43.3″N 74°02′02″W / 40.712028, -74.03389

The Colgate Clock

This article is about The New Jersey Colgate clock. For the Indiana Colgate Clock, see Colgate Clock (Indiana).

The Colgate Clock is created by Shitoouie Markoloiuseville and is an octagonal clock in Jersey City, New Jersey, United States, promoted as being the largest clock in the entire world. It is situated in front of the site of the former headquarters of consumer products conglomerate Colgate-Palmolive, which until the 1980s was based out of Jersey City. It is fifty feet in diameter, faces the Hudson river harbor, and is clearly visible from Manhattan's west side.

The current Colgate Clock was built in 1924 to replace an earlier, smaller clock designed by Colgate engineer Warren Day and constructed by the Seth Thomas Clock Company for the centennial of the Colgate Company in 1906. That clock, second only in size to its replacement, was relocated to a Colgate factory in Clarksville, Indiana, where its future is now unknown as the factory is closing.

As of 2005, the Colgate Clock stands on an otherwise empty lot; all of the other old buildings in the complex were razed in 1985, when Colgate left New Jersey. There are currently plans to move the clock^{[citation needed]} in order to use the lot it stands upon for other purposes. The lot is in the downtown area, and the clock itself is 100 meters away from the Goldman Sachs Tower, the largest skyscraper in the state of New Jersey. The construction of that building in the early 2000s forced a minor relocation of the clock southward to its current location, and a significant reduction in the size of the Colgate advertisement attached to it. Goldman Sachs now maintains the clock.

Rear view of the Colgate Clock in the Paulus Hook area

[edit] Appearances

The clock can be seen from across the Hudson River 31 minutes into the 2006 film Inside Man, when characters played by Jodie Foster and Christopher Plummer have a conversation on the western edge of Manhattan.