Allan Appel Photo
A 1930s pocketwatch, costing two to three dollars at the time.
Not all the flowers may be out in time for Sunday’s Cherry Blossom Festival in Wooster Square, but 50 clocks will be.
The still-working antique time pieces from the 1880s to the 1950s, all manufactured by the New Haven Clock Company, will be ticking away in a first-time pop-up exhibition to highlight local collectors of home-grown timepieces.
The collection, pulled together by Frank Carrano (pictured), local collector and former head of the New Haven Teachers Union, will be on display in the Maresca & Sons Funeral Home building at 592 Chapel Street, kitty corner from Wooster Square park, on Saturday and Sunday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.
The collection is “a convergence of so many things,” said Carrano during a preview tour on Friday. “I realized how connected I was to New Haven Clock Company,” Carrano said.
The Maresca Funeral Home building was formerly the Henry Austin-designed home of James English, modernizer and owner of the New Haven Clock Company and later a U.S. congressman, senator, and governor of Connecticut. (Click here for a brief history of the company, which, along with Sargent Manufacturing Company and Winchester Repeating Arms Company, was one of the anchoring employers for New Haven’s early 20th-century Italian immigrant community.)
Rapuano wearing the top hat of his great-grandfaher Alfonso Maresca, in the picture.
New arrivals, like Alfonso Maresca, the great-grandfather of Maresca’s current fourth-generation owner Neil Rapuano, often worked at what people in the neighborhood called “the clock shop,” said Carrano.
Carrano has eight of his own clocks in the show. He said he got into collecting out of admiration for the gears, pendulums, movements — all the connectedness of mechanical clocks.
His family had arrived in New Haven earlier than most from Italy and established a grocery, Carrano’s Market, on Chapel Street where the overpass now is. None of his family members worked at the clock shop, although everybody stopped in the family’s store to get coffee and cigarettes on their way to work, Carrano recalled.
An 1880s era clock ogee clock, so named for the wood border.
Still, among the family treasures are documents showing that his grandfather, Francesco Carrano, after whom he is named, was one of the donors of an elegant standing New Haven Clock Company product sent home to grace the cathedral in Amalfi in 1908.
“It’s still working,” said Carrano, as he arranged the clocks and the photographs around the spacious room on Maresca’s first floor.
On Saturday and Sunday, staffers from the New Haven Museum, which is supporting the local collectors, will be bringing over photographs of workers assembling clocks in the factory.
New Haven Made, For The Working And Middle Class
Maresca Funeral Home.
Having bought the company from its founder, Chauncey Jerome, James English substituted brass parts for wood in the innards of the time pieces. That innovation enabled the clocks suddenly to be far more affordable.
“They made clocks that everybody could buy,” Carrano said. “Their customer base was the ordinary working person. That was the significant thing. It allowed a whole class of people who might not have had a clock in the parlor to have one.”
Alarm and kitchen clocks from the 1940s.
Soon clocks were decorative as well as functional, and the New Haven Clock Company turned out decorative items like gingerbread clocks and banjo-shaped clocks, several of which will be in the exhibit.
The tablets of the New Haven Clock Company’s clocks displayed a wide range of images. Some had scenes of plantation-type mansions reminiscent of Mount Vernon, as well as dreamy, silhouetted, Art Deco-style compositions (pictured).
The company manufactured pocketwatches too, like the one Carrano pulled out of his, well, yes, his pocket.
In its heyday, New Haven Clock Company shipped items all over the world. During World War II, all of the shop’s production was for the military. After the war, however, the company could not keep up, and the doors were shuttered in 1960. The clock company’s building on Hamilton Street remains full of its ghosts.
But its products will be in bloom, beside the cherry blossoms, on Saturday and Sunday.
On Saturday Carrano will offer tours, and 89-year-old Vera Vergati, who used to work in the offices at New Haven Clock Company, will be on hand to offer her recollections. On Sunday, Betsy Fox, the curator of the New Haven Museum’s current paean to area manufacturing, From Clocks to Lollipops, will be giving a lecture at 2 p.m.
“It’s something New Haven should be celebrating. It’s an important part of the city, and it’s a great legacy,” said Carrano.
Nice clocks but there are more homeless than cherry blossoms in Wooster Sq. and we have bigger fish to fry.
Frank Panzarella will be singing Brother Can You Spare a Dime while we hoist our housing banner and offer free books at our homeless giveaway table. None of the politicians I called would tell me whether they would show, a cowardly but expected move. I am on the block assoc. (dues-payer).