The iconic Jessop’s Clock — a 22-foot-tall visual spectacle that served as an outdoor landmark in downtown San Diego for more than a century — is getting closer to making a reappearance in Balboa Park.
Long disassembled and stored in eight separate crates since it was removed from the ground floor of Horton Plaza in 2018, the clock is slowly being reassembled while ers raise money to display it once again.
The clock became a symbol of San Diego’s ambition to become a great city after it was first installed in 1907 in front of Jessop Jeweler at 952 Fifth Avenue.
San Diego only had about 35,000 residents at the time. The Panama-California Exposition, which would put the city on the map, was still eight years away.
But the Jessop family was thinking big, and so were many others San Diegans.
“A clock is an audacious thing to present,’” said Bill Lawrence, the longtime executive director of the San Diego History Center. “Great cities of the world have street clocks.”
The Jessop family recently committed to donating the clock to the History Center to become the focal point of the center’s plan to renovate and modernize its space inside Casa de Balboa.
“It’s important for our region,” Lawrence said of the clock, explaining that it became a calling card for the jewelry store and for San Diego. “To understand where we are going as a community, we need to understand where we’ve been. This is one of those touchstones.”
Bruce Coons, executive director of the Save Our Heritage Organisation, said the 1,200-pound clock was an ideal symbol for San Diego because it was ambitious, innovative and visually striking.
“It’s terrific piece of art and engineering,” Coons said. “I looking up at the clock as a kid.”
Coons recalls the clock as the one landmark everybody knew when it was located on Fifth Avenue, and then when it moved into Horton Plaza in 1985.
“It was the kind of thing where you’d say, ‘Meet me by the clock,’” Coons said.
But the clock was vulnerable outdoors and was vandalized multiple times — including one particularly bad incident when Horton Plaza was losing tenants and regular security details had stopped at the outdoor mall.
“The shopping center was in the process of imploding,” said Jim Jessop, whose great-grandfather commissioned the clock. “Now it’s going to be indoors. It’s going to be locked up at night and protected well.”
Jessop is trying to raise $4 million — $1 million to restore the clock and erect it inside the History Center, and another $3 million for an endowment to cover expenses in perpetuity.
“It’s a perfect centerpiece,” Jessop said. “People will be able to walk up a circular staircase to see the top of the clock.”
The clock has some unusual features, including 12 small dials showing the time in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Milan, St. Petersburg, Calcutta, Cape Town, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Melbourne and Mexico City.
The main dials on each of the clock’s four sides show local time and are much larger than the out-of-town ones. There are also separate dials displaying the day, date and month.
How the clock works is also unusual for a large street clock. Jessop said his great-grandfather specialized in making watches, so that’s the blueprint for the design.
“He made this like a giant pocket watch,” said Jessop, noting that all of the clock’s parts were handmade in the jewelry shop based on designs created in his great-grandfather’s Coronado home. “You’ve never seen this before, and you will probably never see it again.”
The clock’s three locations have been 952 Fifth Avenue from 1907 to 1927, 1041 Fifth Avenue from 1927 to 1985 and Horton Plaza from 1985 until 2018.
Jessop and former San Diego Union-Tribune sportswriter John Freeman recently published a book about the clock and the Jessop family called “Timeless Treasures.”
Told in first-person narrative with archival photos, the 225-page coffee-table book covers the family’s many setbacks and triumphs dating back to the early 1890s, when Jessop’s great-grandparents arrived in San Diego via steamship, rail and horsedrawn buggy.
Jessop is a native San Diegan and a graduate of Point Loma High School and San Diego State University.
