Preserving American Watchmaking Heritage

A number of principles are foundational to the watch industry and watch collecting.

Screenshot of a Timex advertisement from the 1950s.

One of these is, no doubt, the preservation and perpetuation of heritage. Brands with a longer legacy often maintain archives overseen by someone with a title like "Heritage Director." Some open museums in order to share heritage with the public. Vintage collectors connect with these archives and museums, which further perpetuates interest in and enjoyment of collecting. The list goes on.

It was with this context in mind that I learned that the United States, and Connecticut in particular, has an import watchmaking heritage property which may soon disappear, never to return. That property is the Timex World Headquarters in Middlebury, CT.

Ground level view of the Timex World HQ. Source: Bellapart.

I first wrote about this property in 2023 when I learned from local news that Timex had sold it off to a local developer. This wasn't entirely surprising. In 2020, a hedge fund called The Baupost Group bought a majority stake in Timex. At some point the new owners decided to sell off the building.

Since my last post on this topic, the new property owner's plans for the headquarters have come into focus. They intend to raze the building and replace it with a somewhat sizeable distribution center in its place (think warehouse, semi trucks, etc). Under some circumstances, this might not draw much attention. If the Timex Headquarters were an anodyne shoebox of a building, indistinguishable from countless other office spaces scattered about the Northeast megalopolis, perhaps very few people would notice.

Arial view of the Timex World HQ.

But that is not what we're dealing with here.

I learned this from two sources last week. The first is Nick Stuller, who is actively working to save the Timex building. We spoke by phone about his advocacy. The second person is Siena Leone-Getty, a graduate student in the Historic Preservation M. S. program at the Pratt Institute in New York City. I attended a zoom this week during which Siena presented her thesis entitled "Timex World Headquarters: a Case Study for 21st Century Preservation." I learned a lot from these discussions and much of what follows draws from Siena and Nick's work related to the Timex property.

The Timex building in question opened in 2001. It was a thoughtful and careful collaboration between Timex's owner at the time, Fred Olsen, and designer Douglas Disborough (then working for architecture firm Fletcher Thompson). The building is a 45,000 square foot open space fully wrapped by floor-to-ceiling windows.

Screenshot of a post by Instagram user chris_carvalho_ct feature a view of fall foliage taken from the interior of the Timex building.

It reminds me a bit of the Audemars Piguet museum in some ways. According to Siena, the building was "designed to encourage collaboration, communication, creativity" and "reduce hierarchy." Siena also estimates that the project, which cost $23 million, cost triple what was necessary in order to build a more traditional space meeting more typical requirements.

The building is noteworthy for a number of reasons. First among these is its integration with the surrounding property. The grounds were designed by a somewhat well-known landscape architect named Jack Curtis, who was also commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building, and General Foods. Of note in the design was somewhat remote placement of employee parking so that the beginning and end of the work day involved a quarter mile walk to and from the building (one of my sources tells me that in the colder months this feature was not always enjoyed by employees).

Instagram post by the account of a local community group visiting the Timex property.

Along the walk, employees passed a sundial, of sorts, made of large pieces of timber.

One of the more interesting horological features of the building design involves an oculus in the roof and markers on the floor. During each of the equinoxes, sunlight through the oculus lands on the markers and signals that the equinox has arrived. In essence, the building is designed to track the arrival of two key moments in the seasons. From this perspective, it acts as a sort of timekeeper. Similar oculuses are featured in the Parthenon in Rome and the Holy Spirit Church in Goa, India. In light of all these features, the Timex Headquarters won three awards from the American Institute of Architects.

Because of the architectural uniqueness of the former Timex Headquarters, there is widespread interest among Middlebury residents in saving the building (I contacted a group representing the owner who plans to remove the building but I have not yet received a response). Initially, I wondered if this was a simple question of "NIMBY-ism" (ie "not in my backyard" resistance to commercial development of property) but my conversation with Nick Stuller convinced me otherwise. There are so many families with connections to Timex in Middlebury and the surrounding towns that the community has genuine interest in saving the Timex Headquarters.

A number of significant hurdles remain, though.

An arial view of the Timex property, employee parking visible on the left and a large solar panel field on the right.

The Timex building is disadvanted in the push for historical preservation since, through a certain lens, it is not "historical" enough. It is less than 30 years old. The draft minutes of a CT State Historic Preservation Office hearing about the building makes it clear that the newness of the building is a major impediment (a second barrier to preservation is that the owner of the property does not want the building added to any historical preservation program because that would inhibit redevelopment). At the end of their hearing, state authorities decided not to preserve the Timex headquarters.

However, I was somewhat shocked that the CT State Historical Preservation Office did not consider the role of watchmaking and clockmaking in Connecticut's history. Waterbury (the original home of Timex) is known as "Brass City," in part because its machining of brass parts was connected to the watch and clock industry. Connecticut's first clock manufacturer, Thomas Harland, opened his workshop in 1773 in Norwich, three years before the United States became a country. And Timex itself began as a Connecticut business in 1854. At 168 years old, the business has existed for more than 68% of American history.

Contrast this with Patek Philippe, which has "only" been around for 25.3% of Swiss history. Despite the fact that Patek is relatively young compared with its national home, the brand has a highly well-regarded museum, important archives delineating the history of individual timepieces going back many, many decades, and a sales "salon" in Geneva dating to 1891. It is even more striking, then, that Timex has almost no preserved spaces or collections despite the fact that it is far more historically important for the United States.

Interior view of the Timex building posted by Instagram user Travelerscouch.

The brand did have a museum in Waterbury, CT but it closed in 2015, making the headquarters building perhaps the last opportunity to establish a permanent space celebrating one of the giants of American watchmaking.

In many ways, the turmoil involved in preserving a "new" building like the Timex headquarters reminds me a great deal of the debates over the term "neovintage watches." Can relatively new objects still take on the import and value of commonly accepted vintage items? Increasingly, watch collectors are willing to embrace timepieces from the 1990s and aughts as vintage and collectible, a sentiment which would argue in favor of preserving the Timex Headquarters. There may be some grounds for cautious optimism. There have been court cases involving the property and, at present, the developer does not seem to have the approvals required to remove the building and start construction of a new building. And, Nick Stuller's organization is filing a request to add the Timex Headquarters to the U. S. National Register of Historic Places. Arguing in favor of this submission is the fact that UNESCO recently designated the craftsmanship of mechanical watchmaking and art mechanics as part of intangible world cultural heritage. It remains to be seen if federal authorities in the United States understand that preserving the Timex Headquarters could significantly contribute to ongoing worldwide efforts to preserve this heritage.

Note If you would like to communicate with Nick Stuller about the effort to preserve the Timex Headquarters, please visit the Save Historic Middlebury web page. You can also reach his organization by email: participate@shmiddlebury.org .

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