Lansing’s Funny Clock Is an Unrecognized World Record Holder

Lansing — Downtown Lansing isn’t known for much these days. Despite some scattered attempts at development to make the city a hip place for young people, the vibes of urban decay, vagrancy, and constantly billowing steam still dominate the neighborhood.

We’re not just talking about all the hot air from politicians yammering in the Capitol building, either, but literal steam from the city’s municipal steam loop. It leaks into the air constantly, white clouds emanating from vents and cracks along the streets.

It also powers one of the largest, and rarest, steam clocks in the world—a roadside tower that Lansingites pass every day and not even know it.

Lansing’s Rotary Steam Clock was built in 1997, a gift to the city on its 150th birthday by the local Rotary Club. It stands 31 feet tall at the intersection of Michigan and Grand Avenues, the tan brick mirroring the small paved area next to Lansing’s 9/11 Remembrance Memorial.

The official Guinness Book of World Records listing for largest steam-powered clock belongs to the Ariadne steam clock in St. Helier, on the island of Jersey in the Channel Islands. That clock stands at a paltry 30 feet, mind you.

Lansing’s clock has never been officially inspected by Guinness, but at 31 feet, it’s actually the tallest clock of its kind in the world.

The heart of the clock is its restored 1927 steam engine, borrowed off of an original Seth Thomas Clock Company clock. It’s placed at the center of the clocktower, with glass windows ringing it so viewers can look inside and see the engine working.

The engine is solid, ornate metal with gears and bands. It’s a relic of an older age, from a time when machines were solid and built to last 100 years.

The engine is powered by steam generated by Lansing’s Board of Water & Light, and pumped throughout the city on a municipal steam loop.

Steam loops have fallen out of fashion as localized electrical heating technology improved. Yet several cities, including Lansing, Detroit, and New York City, still employ them as an effective power distribution and heating method for their downtown cores.

The Lansing Board of Water & Light maintains the citywide steam generating system, which feeds steam into the clock, among other buildings. That steam enters the clock’s old steam engine, spinning the gears that keep the clock working, and feeding through old steam chimes to make it sing every hour.

It’s an interesting, anachronistic clock design that speaks to the history of Lansing itself. A municipal steam system, started in 1919, powering a steam engine built in 1927, housed within a clock tower built in the late 1990s, and left to stand ignominiously over a plaza dominated by aggressive vagrants and daylight drug abuse just blocks from the state Capitol.

That’s the real shame of the matter, in the end. Even in broad daylight, the steam clock tower isn’t somewhere you’d want to bring your children. Too many vagrants sleeping on the stairs and benches, too many suspicious eyes glaring at you, too many discarded needles and naloxone boxes littering the ground.

It’s a prime example of the crisis facing Lansing, and other major American cities. Generations built these places up, and built monuments to their history and achievement, public spaces for their ancestors to enjoy.

But we’ve let them decay, and surrendered them to antisocial dysfunction. We’ve let the fountains leak, and finally stop spouting water at all. It’s a miracle Lansing’s Steam Clock still runs at all, though some online complained recently that it doesn’t always chime.

Perhaps the glass encasement saved it, sheltering the delicate steam engine from the scourge around it. It certainly isn’t kept clean, the glass covered in dirt and grime, cobwebs hanging from every surface inside the engine room.

Lansing could be a beautiful city if it tried, if the government was willing to do anything at all to keep the city functional and well-policed. The steam clock wouldn’t be hard to maintain, just clean the glass and dust it off every so often.

Yet that’s the real sign of social decay, when basic maintenance tasks are delayed, and then forgotten, and things start to break slowly, and then all at once. The breakdowns compound, and you’re left with a place that’s become a shadow of its former self.

Here’s one small place to start. Send a municipal worker over to the steam clock and clean it up a bit. Maybe then, it’ll finally be recognized by Guinness, as it rightfully should.