The missing terra cotta bank clock on Avenue C

It’s a wonderful burst of color among the tenements and occasional weedy lot on Avenue C: a three-story 1920s building with an elaborate terra cotta and tile ornament above the entrance.

Painted in bright green, blue, red, and orange, the ornament—flanked by urns and adorned with an eagle—was supposed to have a clock in the center.

For years its been empty, a mosaic-like place holder for a long gone neighborhood time piece.

What’s the story? This was a branch of The Public National Bank of New York, built in 1923 at the northeast corner of Avenue C and Seventh Street, according to a 2008 Landmarks Preservation Committee Report.

Back then, this was a thriving, busy bank in a typical New York working class neighborhood, with “tellers in the monumental banking floor on the ground story,” as the Landmarks report put it.

But times and neighborhoods change, and by the 1950s, it was being used as a nursing home.

In the 1970s, the building passed through various hands before being made over into apartments in the 1980s (at right, in 1983)

And the missing clock? That’s still a question mark.

Unfortunately, since it’s been MIA so long, it seems doubtful that anyone affiliated with the building has plans to put a replacement inside the empty space.

So it’s left to us to imagine (with the help of old photos of the clock, above) the lost timepiece.

Think of the neighborhood residents who, in an age before smart phones and digital watches, relied on street clocks to keep appointments and know when the next streetcar would appear.

[Third photo: Landmarks Preservation Committee report; fourth photo: