The Colgate Clock is a 50-foot-wide octagonal timepiece sitting at ground level on the Jersey City waterfront, staring straight across the Hudson River at Manhattan. It’s been glowing red at night since 1924, it was once billed as the largest clock on Earth, and — here’s the part most visitors never learn — it isn’t even the original. That one’s in Indiana.
If you’ve ever taken the PATH train into the city, watched a fireworks show from the Hudson, or just squinted across the water from Lower Manhattan, you’ve probably seen this thing without knowing its name. It’s one of those landmarks that’s so familiar it becomes invisible. Which is a shame, because the real story behind it is stranger than the clock itself.
What Exactly Is the Colgate Clock?
It’s a single-faced, octagon-shaped clock built from structural steel, and it is genuinely enormous. The surface of the clock is 1,963.5 square feet and 50 feet in diameter, with a minute hand 25 feet 10 inches long and an hour hand 20 feet long. For comparison, that minute hand alone is longer than a city bus.
The clock is designed to actually work, not just look impressive. The timepiece can be adjusted and is maintained to stay within one minute of accurate time. And it isn’t a museum piece stuck up on some abandoned rooftop — it’s a fully functioning, publicly visible landmark you can walk right up to along the Hudson River Walkway.
Why Is There a Giant Octagon-Shaped Clock on the Waterfront?
The shape isn’t random. Its design was inspired by Colgate’s product, a laundry cleanser, Octagon Soap, which it was manufacturing at the time. Colgate wasn’t just a toothpaste company back then — it was one of Jersey City’s biggest employers, and the clock doubled as a piece of branding you could see from miles around.
This particular clock isn’t even the first one Colgate put up. The Colgate Clock was designed by Colgate engineer Warren Day and constructed by Seth Thomas Clock Company for the centennial of the founding of the Colgate Company in 1906, and its design was inspired by the shape of a bar of Octagon Soap, first manufactured by Colgate as a laundry cleaner in 1887. That original clock was made of structural steel, was 38 feet in diameter, and was proclaimed the largest clock in the world when it was mounted on the roof of an eight-story Colgate warehouse in 1908.
It was lit up in a way that was pretty flashy for the era, too. The clock was illuminated at night by 1,607 bulbs that emitted 28,000 watts of light and had an advertisement reading “Colgate’s Soaps-Perfumes” in 20-foot-high letters, visible from approximately 20 miles away, as far as Staten Island and the Bronx.
So Where’s the Original Clock Now?
Here’s the twist most people never hear about. When Colgate decided to build a bigger, better clock in 1924, the company didn’t scrap the old one — it shipped it off. Since November 17th, 1924, the original 40-foot Colgate Clock has been mounted on top of the Colgate-Palmolive factory in Clarksville, Indiana, and it’s one of the world’s largest single-facing clocks, with each hand weighing in at over 500 pounds. That building, oddly enough, has its own strange past. The Clarksville site had been a state prison before being converted to a factory by Colgate-Palmolive in 1923, and for a brief period it was both, as prisoners stayed in cells at the location during the building’s conversion.
So technically, the “real” first Colgate Clock is now a Rust Belt landmark facing Louisville, Kentucky, across the Ohio River, while the “replacement” clock became the famous one everybody photographs in New Jersey.
The Clock You See Today: Bigger, Bolder, and Built to Last
The clock that now sits in Jersey City debuted at noon on a winter day nearly a century ago. The original clock was replaced with the current clock at noon on December 1st, 1924, by Jersey City’s then-mayor, Frank Hague. It quickly earned bragging rights on both sides of the river. It is considered to be a New York City landmark ranking alongside the likes of the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and the Verrazano Bridge.
It wasn’t invincible, though. Three decades of wind, rain, and salt air off the Hudson eventually caught up with it. After enduring the elements for over 31 years, the clock was stopped for repairs on June 13, 1955, because the laminated wooden hands were waterlogged and the steel trusses that supported the hands were rusted. New Yorkers apparently took the outage personally. The clock was temporarily stopped for much-needed repairs for just about six weeks during the summer of 1955, causing countless New Yorkers to call Colgate complaining about the interruption of their reliance on the clock. Imagine caring that much about a clock you don’t even own.
Why the Clock Doesn’t Sit on a Factory Roof Anymore
If you go looking for the Colgate factory itself, you won’t find it. Colgate pulled out of Jersey City decades ago, and the clock had to be relocated to survive. It was located atop what was once the headquarters of Colgate-Palmolive until 1985, when it was moved to a ground-level location 1,300 feet south of that building, which was demolished and replaced with the Goldman Sachs Tower.
It’s had a couple of touch-ups since then. The clock was removed from the building, lowered to ground level, and installed as a freestanding local landmark on the Goldman Sachs property, which became part of the 24-acre waterfront redevelopment at Exchange Place in the 1990s, and in 2013 the clock was moved to its present location. Even the land underneath it has a slightly awkward arrangement — nobody named “Colgate” actually owns it. The clock now rests on an empty lot, leased to Colgate-Palmolive by the state of New Jersey, and maintained by Goldman Sachs.
The clock also just quietly hit a milestone. The clock’s centennial celebration at the Hudson River Walkway occurred on December 1, 2024. A hundred years of telling New Jersey and Manhattan what time it is, and most people walking past still don’t know its name.
Is It Really the World’s Largest Clock?
It used to claim that title, but times have changed — literally. The clock was designed specifically to be seen from a great distance, and for many years it was considered the world’s largest clock, though it’s probably way down the current list of the largest clocks in existence today. Though it’s often billed as the world’s largest clock in tourism literature, Wikipedia now places it in the ninth spot worldwide. It’s been outpaced by newer mega-clocks overseas, including the Dokaae clock face at the top of the Makkah Royal Clock Tower in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, at 43 meters (141 feet) in diameter, which dwarfs anything New Jersey has to offer. Still, for a clock built during the Coolidge administration, staying in the top ten is nothing to scoff at.
One genuinely surprising fact: the clock isn’t just decorative for people on the ground. The clock is a mandatory reporting point for flights below Class B airspace in the Hudson River VFR corridor. Pilots flying low along the Hudson actually use this giant soap-shaped clock as a navigation checkpoint.
Planning a Visit
The clock sits along the Hudson River Walkway near Exchange Place in Jersey City, an easy walk from the Exchange Place PATH station and just steps from the water. It’s free, it’s outdoors, and it’s open all the time — no tickets, no hours, no gift shop. Go at golden hour for photos with Manhattan glowing behind it, or after dark to catch the red neon hands doing their thing against the skyline. Pair it with a walk along the rest of the waterfront promenade, and you’ve got a solid, low-key afternoon that most tourists visiting New York skip entirely, which honestly makes it more fun.
It’s easy to write the Colgate Clock off as just a big advertisement that outlived its company. But stand underneath it once, look at the size of those hands, and think about the fact that its literal twin is sitting on a former prison building six hundred miles away — and it starts to feel like one of the more oddly compelling landmarks in the entire region.
NOTE TO THE ADVENTURER: This guide is meant to spark curiosity for what lies beyond the horizon — not to serve as a guarantee. Roads fall into disrepair, buildings are torn down and rebuilt, and properties change hands; 'tis your responsibility to do your own research before setting out. Always heed local and regional law, and always respect ground that isn't your own. Take every entry here as a suggestion, not a decree. This guide's contents were gathered with the aid of artificial intelligence, and like any scout, it will from time to time lead you astray. You assume all risk in following its counsel, and neither this blog nor its author is liable for any loss, injury, or misfortune that results.
