Sparrows and pigeons can no longer make whoopee among the intricate works of the City Hall giant clock, declared to be the largest in this section of the country. -- Houston Chronicle, March 12, 1930.

In those days, City Hall was located at Market Square. And if you happened to be living here in the 1920s, you might have looked upon the City Hall clock with a mix of bemusement and resignation at its inability to properly keep time.

Blame the birds.

The head janitor there said the birds playing around in there — building nests and hatching offspring — were fouling up the works.

The Chronicle wrote:

For years the clock has been temperamental and lazy, running a few days at a time on schedule, then resting for long periods. And it has made no attempt to keep the correct time. Sometimes the hour hand on the east face would say 5 o'clock while the west face hand was pointed to 9 o'clock.

Cold weather has long had a bad effect on the clock, giving ... the clock rheumatism so bad that it would quit operating at the sign of approaching cold weather. It got so that the loafers dotting the sidewalk curb outside the City Hall front steps could tell when cold weather was coming by looking at the face of the clock.

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Watchmaker E.W. Rylander was called in to fix the clock and shoo the birds away. Using mesh wire, he made sure they didn't return.

Ed Lake, chief of the janitorial crew at City Hall, shared Rylander's frustration at the whole situation. But Lake did reserve some respect for those feathered creatures.

"I never saw such smart birds," Lake told the Chronicle. "They seemed to know when the clock was going to strike and a big bunch of them would line up on the clapper to ride it back and forth.

"When the big sledge-like clapper (it is several feet long and probably weighs 25 pounds) would strike against the side of the bell practically all of them would fall off; but the bolder spirits would clamber on again. Those blooming birds used to stop it every now and then and kept it out of condition a lot of the time."

The clock has been a fixture in Market Square since 1904, when a new City Hall went up to replace one that burned. When City Hall moved to Bagby Street in the late 1930s, the clock was put into storage and eventually ended up in East Texas. In the 1990s the city purchased it and erected a new tower for it at the corner of Travis and Congress. It's officially called the Louis and Annie Friedman Clock Tower, named after the Hungarian-born parents of Saul and Elaine Friedman, who paid for the tower.





