NEW YORK—Marvin Schneider, 79, flashed his New York employee identification badge — “clock repairer” — and walked into City Hall in Lower Manhattan on Friday morning.

The end of daylight saving time was approaching — clocks are supposed to be turned back Sunday at 2 a.m. — and Schneider had gone to City Hall to turn back time.

Schneider’s actual title is a bit more grandiose than his badge description. He is the city’s official clock master and he has been tending some of the city’s grandest public clocks since the late 1970s.

His year-round maintenance includes timing adjustments — although these old clocks are surprisingly accurate, he said — and repairing the gears, levers and chains behind those giant clock faces that some people still rely on even in the smartphone age.

He also replaces worn-down or broken parts and always applies liberal amounts of oil to the old mechanisms, using his “Wizard of Oz” style oil can.

“It’s a dying art — there are fewer people around today who know what to do with these things,” said Schneider, who oversees a dozen clocks under the jurisdiction of the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, which operates 55 city-owned buildings.

Age has not kept Schneider from getting to the clocks, often by climbing into tight corners unknown to most New Yorkers.

This week was devoted to the biannual ritual of adjusting the clocks in accordance with daylight saving time, moving them an hour forward in the spring and an hour back in the fall.

In the hallways and offices in City Hall, he seemed to know the entire security staff, as did his longtime assistant, Forest Markowitz, 68.

In a third-floor office, he turned back an old manual wall clock one hour by moving the hands forward 11 hours, since turning the hands backward could break the mechanism, said Schneider, who then stood listening to the pendulum swing, clicking softly as the city bustled below.

“After a while, it’s like a heartbeat — you learn to listen for idiosyncrasies in the rhythm,” said Schneider, an Army veteran who is an ordained rabbi and lives in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.

He finished adjusting a half-dozen wall or grandfather clocks in City Hall and was now ready for the big one — the tower clock that is visible from the street. Schneider climbed up a ladder through a hatch and onto a catwalk on the roof. He unlocked the clock tower to inspect the mechanism of the 1918 four-faced clock. It is still intact with its original gears, though they are now powered by two small electric motors, instead of weights.

For several minutes, Schneider twisted the drive shaft leading to a cluster gear overhead that branched out to the four respective clock faces.

He set the proper time according to his watch, which is connected by cellular service to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Fort Collins, Colorado.

“As long as I know I’m in the ballpark,” said Schneider, who retired from his city job in 1995, but continues to work part time for the city.

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.

Schneider’s role as New York’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 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. 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.”

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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.”

Once he fixed the tower clock, city officials began letting him use much of his workday to repair other prominent city timepieces.

In 1992, then-mayor David N. Dinkins named Schneider the city’s clock master — a position that had been vacant since the late 1800s, Schneider said.

Some public clocks in New York are still manually powered by weights. But many others, while retaining their original machinery, have had their weights replaced with small electric motors that drive a still-intact intricate gear structure.

To add digital timing devices would be heresy to Schneider, since mechanical clocks have become increasingly rare and stand as symbols of great American clock making.

Over the decades, every mayor has had his own relationship with the clocks and therefore with Schneider.

Dinkins treasured them as historical pieces. Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg ran tight ships and were adamant that the clocks be synchronized.

He recalled of Bloomberg, “Compared to his computer, the clock on the wall was always 15 seconds apart, and it irked him.”

There is less tension under the de Blasio administration, he said, which is just as well, since the old clocks can sometimes lose proper time by several minutes, sometimes because of weather or aging parts. But most, like the City Hall tower clock, keep good time because of great craftsmanship, Schneider said.

“They advertised it as being accurate to within 10 seconds a month, which is good enough for the average Joe’s schedule,” said Schneider, who rolls his eyes at obsessions with knowing time down to the second.

“It’s what you call overkill,” he said. “We’re not dropping astronauts on Mars.”