Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll look at how the spring-forward time change this weekend happens with some of New York’s most famous clocks. We’ll also get details on a filing due today in Mayor Eric Adams’s corruption case.
There are places in New York where the spring-forward time change this weekend will be noticeable — buildings with clocks that just about anyone can see.
There are places in those buildings that almost no one ever sees — hidden-away rooms where the time change actually happens. Where time will speed up on Sunday morning. Where time will stop in the fall.
One such place is behind a locked door in a $1,331-a-night hotel room high above East 24th Street. Guests are not given a key to that door. Where their room has a bed with high-thread-count sheets and the sleek look of minimalism, the room behind the door has plate-size gears that have to be oiled regularly.
That room is home to the inner workings of one of the city’s most famous clocks, the one in what was originally the headquarters of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. An automated mechanism is set to move the hands from 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. when the time comes. No longer does a night watchman have to do the job.
Like the former MetLife clock, your smartphone, smartwatch and laptop will probably adjust by themselves. If you need a reminder to change the alarm clock by the bed or the one on the microwave, this is it.
Daylight saving time is unpopular. A YouGov poll in 2023 found that 62 percent of American adults favored eliminating it. President Trump has said he shared that view but — amid the barrage of executive orders in the first six weeks of his second term — he has taken no action. On Thursday, he called it “a 50-50 issue,” adding, “If something’s a 50-50 issue, it’s hard to get excited about it.”
At Grand Central
As with the former MetLife clock, an automated system will change the clock that looks down Park Avenue from above the 42nd Street face of Grand Central Terminal. It is tied to a “modular clock synchronization unit” that brings the clocks in Grand Central in line with the U.S. Naval Observatory. Of the station’s 51 clocks, 26 are digital and 25 analog, with hands.
“Changing the clocks for Daylight Savings is a mostly painless process,” said a spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which owns Grand Central.
Still, a Metro-North Railroad employee on the night shift walks through the station and looks at each of the clocks. “If any issues with synchronization do occur,” the spokeswoman said, they can often be resolved through an interface. “If not,” she said, “the clock will be adjusted manually.”
That is how the clocks were reset at least until the early 1980s.
Paul Kugler, who kept the clocks running then, understood the importance of his job and the importance of the clocks in the lives of engineers, conductors and commuters hoping to take the 5:29 to White Plains or the 5:32 to Croton-Harmon. “Whatever time I give them, that’s what time the railroad runs on,” he told The New York Times in 1980. “Imagine if one day I decided to set things just a minute late …”
The Times said that was just an idle daydream.
In the clock room
As for the former MetLife clock, it is now high up in the New York Edition Hotel. There are actually four clocks, one on each face of the tower that MetLife vacated more than a decade ago.
Each has its own equipment room like the one for the north face I saw when hotel officials unlocked the door and led the way in.
All four clocks are about 24 feet in diameter, said Mike Elderhorst, the fifth-generation owner of the company that tends the automated control system. The hands, made of copper and brass, are heavy. The minute hands “easily weigh 600 pounds” apiece, he said, while each of the shorter hour hands is a mere 400 pounds.
On Sunday morning, the system will do what Elderhorst described as a “fast-forward reset.” This is the opposite of what happens in the fall, when the controller simply stops sending signals for an hour — with good reason, Elderhorst said: “You can’t turn the clocks backwards. It would break the parts.”
There are those who find the spring-forward time change onerous. They miss the extra hour of sleep. Not Frank Galasso, the hotel’s director of engineering.
“I don’t sleep much anyway,” he said, “so it doesn’t bother me.”
Weather
Expect sun with temperatures reaching 50, though the early-morning wind chill will be between 25 and 35. In the evening, there is a slight chance of rain and snow, with the temperature dipping to the high 30s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until March 14 (Purim).
The latest New York news
The status of the Eric Adams corruption case
The lawyer charged with presenting independent arguments on the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams is scheduled to weigh in today.
Judge Dale Ho asked the lawyer, Paul Clement, above, for the filing because the Justice Department and Mr. Adams — adversaries when the mayor was indicted last September — are now on the same side. The department’s new leadership under President Trump agrees with Adams that the prosecution should end. The motion says the case hindered Adams from cooperating with Trump’s crackdown on immigration.
Adams, a Democrat, pleaded not guilty to bribery, fraud and other charges and has repeatedly denied doing anything wrong. He has also denied that he and the Trump administration struck a deal to drop the case to clinch his help in deportations.
The Justice Department’s move to seek the dismissal has led to the resignations of prosecutors in Manhattan and Washington, along with calls for Adams’s resignation from several of his opponents. And the mayor’s trial, which had been scheduled to start in April — 10 weeks before the Democratic primary — has been postponed indefinitely.
The judge has already received briefs from other outsiders, like Common Cause, a good-government advocacy organization, as well as former U.S. attorneys, federal judges, law professors and ethics experts. There was even a filing by Michael Flynn, a national security adviser during Trump’s first term.
Judge Ho gave Clement, a former U.S. solicitor general now in private practice, half a dozen questions to address in the filing. One was whether the judge can consider materials beyond the Justice Department’s four-page dismissal motion and its rationale for dropping the charges. That could allow Judge Ho to take into account the blistering letter of resignation from Danielle Sassoon, the interim U.S. attorney for Manhattan, who raised the quid pro quo issue.
METROPOLITAN diary
Cortado
Dear Diary:
When I moved to Park Slope, I lived in an apartment on the third floor of a brownstone. Every Saturday and Sunday, I would walk to the coffee shop around the corner and order a cappuccino and an almond croissant.
After a few years, the woman who was my girlfriend then and is now my wife moved in, and I added a cortado to the order.
Later, we bought a place in Flatbush, and on the morning of our last day in Park Slope, I asked her to go to the coffee shop while I brought down the last boxes.
When she got there, she asked for a cappuccino, a cortado and an almond croissant.
The man behind the counter paused.
“I know that order,” he said. “You’re the cortado!”
— Connor Jennings
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.