He maintains clocks in Staten Island Borough Hall, the old Harlem Courthouse on East 121st Street and the former New York Sun Building on Broadway in Lower Manhattan, and usually moves them backward or forward a few days before dictated by the calendar.

Mr. Schneider’s role as New York City’s version of Father Time began in the 1970s when he was working as a supervisor for the city’s Human Resources Administration.

He would regularly pass 346 Broadway, which was then a city-owned building near Worth Street with a grand, four-faced tower clock that had been broken for years. This bothered Mr. Schneider, for it was a visible reminder of how broken the city was during the fiscal crisis of the 1970s.

He and a fellow worker, Eric Reiner, persuaded city officials to let them fix the clock during their lunch hours. Mr. Schneider had no experience with clock repair aside from his childhood years when he would take little clocks apart. “But,” he said, “I could never put them back together.”

Still, he was handy and willing.

“I learned as I went,” he said. “I’d go around to watchmakers and a lot of them took time off to explain things to me.”