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Andrew MacLeod, a maintenance worker at Old City Hall, works in a small office on the ground floor by the sally port, where prisoners arrive for court hearings. Amid the statuary, books, photos and plants in this crowded office is a wall filled with keys. Some of these keys open the doors to the Old City Hall clock tower.

On Friday morning, Mr. McLeod leads us to an elevator and presses “1” and “3.” “Wait for me on the third floor,” he says. “I have to go clean up a coffee spill in a courtroom.”

A minute later he arrives. We walk to the building’s south end. Mr. MacLeod unlocks a door painted industrial green. “You are about to step back in time,” he says.

Behind the door survives part of the building that has not changed since Old City Hall opened in 1899. A narrow wooden staircase rises into the gloom. We clump up flight after flight, 174 wooden stairs in all, to a door.

The clock tower is unheated, and no panes cover its windows: just grilles to keep out pigeons. The January wind whips right through. Here hang the bells of the clock tower, the largest as tall as a fridge and cast with the coat of arms of the City of Toronto.

“Let’s keep going,” says Mr. MacLeod. We tackle the 50 steps of a steel spiral staircase. Then we ascend another 30 stairs.

We arrive at a spacious room built of wood, brick and steel, and painted white. Light pours in from the faces of the four clocks, one on each side of the tower. In the room’s centre is a glass box, about the size of a passenger van; inside the box whirs the movement of the clock.