Union Station Tower #3

Connecticut’s Union Station tower landmarks Waterbury for millions of motorists traveling through the Naugatuck River Valley on Rt. 8 or across it on I-84. Standing 24 stories high is a masterpiece of design and of the art of virtuoso bricklaying. Although much admired from the outside, few people beside clockmakers have ever been inside. What is there beside the 4-sided, Seth Thomas clock? My thanks to the Pape family, owners of the Waterbury Republican newspaper, for allowing me to answer that question.

 

Upon entering the bottom of the shaft I found myself in a somber brick space surrounded on all sides by nothing but brick.  The tower wall is entirely self-supporting all the way to the top and unreinforced by any interior structure. Two wooden diaphragms divide the shaft into three roughly equal spaces. A metal stair clings to the brickwork as it winds in giant leaps through each space. Waterbury’s masons were skilled at the precision bricklaying needed to erect hundred foot tall masonry stacks that exhausted crud from the factories on the valley floor. However, the 245 foot tall campanile is a work of bricklaying virtuosity rising regulr and unvaried through the first two of the three chambers.

 

Reaching the third chamber I stood beside the pigeon-proofed hands of Seth Thomas; the top space, the head of the campanile, contains the clock, a tiny mechanism with thin metal arms that cross and link via tiny gears and a runt of a mechanism. On repeated visits to such clock towers I’ve taken few photographs of the clockworks which are always a visual disappointment. In this case I was distracted by the magical constellation of tiny windows which appear as subtly etched details on the outside but become a magic lantern inside.

 

Ascending into the top third of the campanile I passed eye-level with the clock. Unlike bells cast from refined metals and tuned to make one’s guts reverberate, I’ve learned that the clockworks that turn the magnificent arms of time on the outside look like little more than erector set parts at the crossing of two long puny bars on the inside. The ends of the bars disappear through the walls to motionless hands. It just isn’t a picture. However, the tiny windows of the head of the campanile, almost invisible on the outside, become a constellation of tiny lights whose beams I would pass through.