Ask Lookout: Why was Santa Cruz’s town clock five minutes early? And who just fixed it?

The Rush Inn, a staple downtown Santa Cruz bar, is a popular spot for New Year’s Eve because of its proximity to the town clock. But for the past few years, everyone has raised their glasses and celebrated at 11:59 p.m., then 11:56 p.m. — when the town clock chimed and showed midnight. 

“Most people just go with it,” Carla Kornder, a bartender at the Rush Inn, said of ringing in the new year a few minutes early. 

This year, the Rush Inn’s patrons will finally celebrate the New Year on time. Last Thursday, an electrician contracted by the City of Santa Cruz reset the clock to the correct time after postponing the project for years.

The town’s quickening timepiece was the result of a snowballing mistake that began by being “off by a hair,” Parks Superintendent Mike Godsy said.

Around three years ago, after decades of perfect timing, the clock was reset during a test of the bell’s chime — the button to test the bell and the button to reset the time are right next to each other on the panel, so whoever did the repair must have hit the reset one, too, Godsy said. It was set back to almost the correct time, but it’s been slipping further from the real deal, going from three minutes ahead in October 2024 to roughly five minutes ahead this summer. 

Godsy said he would always notice the difference when crews were doing work in the area and had plans to do something about it for some time.

But the only access points into the tower are through the small, narrow windows beneath the clock face, and the city’s boom truck, which is outfitted to hoist people into the air on a small fenced platform, had been discontinued. With no funds to replace it, the city’s hands were tied, he said. 

As more calls came in to inform the city about the now-full-five-minute difference, Godsy and a field supervisor decided it was time to do something. 

“Some people would laugh and say, ‘Great, it’s kept me on time for meetings and other things that go on around town,’” Godsy said. “But obviously a lot of people wanted to see it at the right time.”

City officials hired an electrical contractor with a boom truck to complete the project for them, correcting the time and pace so it won’t become offset in the future, Godsy said. The parks department will audit the clock every few years to ensure this.

Dadao Hou, who lives downtown, said he quickly noticed the clock was about three minutes off when he first moved from the Westside in October 2024. As the time progressed forward, he used it as a warning bell to get ready for meetings on the hour and was “conditioned to think about [that] it’s always five minutes earlier.”

Hou said he was surprised when the clock struck at 10 a.m. on the dot last Thursday and he saw that it aligned with his watch. Luckily, he didn’t have any meetings — otherwise he might have been late — and said he “dodged a bullet” with that one. Now, he said he’ll have to be a little more alert about the time, since he won’t get a five-minute warning.

Hou texted his neighborhood group chat to warn them about the change, since the clock being off had turned into a “running joke” among the neighbors. He also called it relatively “un-Santa Cruz” for the clock to be early.

“I think the whole vibe is that we will be late instead of being early,” Hou said. “The clock tower was the opposite to that.”

The clock was first built atop the Independent Order of Odd Fellows building in 1873, and it remained there until a fire devastated Santa Cruz’s downtown in 1899, according to the Santa Cruz Public Library’s local history collection. It was rebuilt with the new Odd Fellows building and dated on its brass plate to Jan. 22, 1900. 

Godsy said the clock still retains the original mechanism from 1900. It was restored within the clock in 2007 and can’t be removed from the tower. A tarp lies over the clockwork in the tower for protection.

“It’s a super beautiful kind of steampunk wizardry of brass and steel, a beautiful clock mechanism,” Godsy said. “So [for] whoever is the lucky person that gets to go up there gets to pull the tarp back and take a peek at it, it’s a really neat piece of mechanical history.”

Through its history, the clock has chimed every half-hour, been silenced after nearby hotels complained, had residents fight for it to ring again, chimed again on a less frequent schedule, then was dismantled in the 1960s when the Odd Fellows building was remodeled.

That was when the Odd Fellows sold the clock to the city of Santa Cruz for $1.01 with the promise that the city would display it somewhere “appropriate.”

In 1976, the clock was installed in the plaza at the confluence of Pacific Avenue, Water Street, Front Street and Mission Street where it stands today. Godsy said the structure is in “really good shape” and will remain standing for decades to come, providing an emblem for one of the city’s most-used public spaces.

“It’s something that we cherish as the city, and we try to keep it nice, clean and beautiful for everyone,” Godsy said. “And we love the fact that it’s like pretty much right up in the middle of our town, which is pretty special for Santa Cruz to have this town clock.”

At the Rush Inn, Kornder would get the occasional snarky “about time you opened” from customers who thought the bar should have been open when the clock struck, rather than on the actual hour. 

“I don’t know what it is about it, but it’s been a problem for a long while now,” she said.

Kornder has worked at the Rush Inn for almost 33 years, most of which saw the clock running smoothly. The erroneous clock didn’t affect business at all, but she said it’s been a “pain in the butt” for the time to be wrong these past years. 

Now that it’s fixed, she said she’ll pay more attention to the bell’s chimes — and she is “ecstatic” to have the clock working again.

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