The Lincoln Road clock is broken. Will owners replace South Beach landmark?
For more than 60 years, anyone in need of the time on South Beach could look to the city skyline over Lincoln Road, where a digital clock steadfastly ticked away the minutes of the day.
But the clock atop the mall’s tallest building took a licking this past year and has gone dark.
Now, the owners of 407 Lincoln Road will decide whether to bring the clock back to life or replace it with a newer display. Until then, you can no longer look up at the 14-story building — once the tallest office building in Miami Beach — to check the time or temperature.
“It’s in really bad condition,” said Stephanie Caceres, an assistant property manager for the building owner, Euroamerican Group. “It’s been dying on us little by little, so I guess it’s come to its end.”
Caceres said the clock — which has a four-sided display — is the original from the building’s construction in 1957. It began malfunctioning last August, she said.
Because the clock’s mechanical system is so old, securing parts for repair is challenging, Caceres said. She said the company will hold an internal meeting in June to consider repairing or replacing the clock.
Concerned residents in South Beach have called the office over the last few months asking about the clock and sharing stories about how looking up at the clock became part of their daily routine, she said. On social media, some said they could see the clock from Ocean Drive, or used it to tell time when at the beach south of Fifth Street.
“We’ve been getting a lot of calls in reference to it,” Caceres said.
A similar scene played out in 1999, when the clock malfunctioned for at least two weeks. The building manager at the time told the Miami Herald that he received up to five calls per day about it.
Timothy Schmand, executive director at Lincoln Road Business Improvement District, said the failure of the clock is one more thing residents can blame on the disastrous 2020.
“It slowly drifted away. For a while it was just the time, then the time stopped completely,” he said, later adding: “2020 really sucked.”
While the 407 Building — and by extension, the clock — has not been designated as historic by the city of Miami Beach, it is located in the Flamingo Park Historic District. That means that a decision to replace the clock might need approval from the city’s Historic Preservation Board, said Jeff Donnelly, public historian of the Miami Design Preservation League.
Donnelly said the postwar modern building, which originally housed the Miami Beach Federal Savings and Loan Association, should be designated as historic.
The 82-year-old said he used to rely on the clock around 2004 when he’d go for early-morning swims at the Flamingo Park Pool.
Donnelly, who didn’t own a cellphone at the time and would not bring his watch to the pool, said the lifeguards didn’t always open the pool up on time so he and his friends would point to the Lincoln Road clock about a mile away to prove it was, in fact, time to open.
“We would be impatient,” he said. “Somebody would say go look at the clock.”
Nowadays, the clock is less necessary for most. Smartphones and computers can show you the temperature, too, now. But Donnelly said the clock carries a nostalgic quality.
For Schmand, the clock is a landmark that connects the city back to the times when cars were still allowed to drive on Lincoln Road.
“It’s an icon,” he said. “It’s like the sunrise.”
This story was originally published May 26, 2021 at 7:01 PM.
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