Proper Decoration

This is pretty far afield for me, but it concerns the built environment, so close enough. Another old photo, from a snowy, icy day in 2019:

That’s the side of the front facade of Albany City Hall (the front facade is on the left), with a pair of plaques from 1897 and 1930 (the building is from 1883). Note that the upper 1897 plaque was “Erected in the mayoralty of John Boyd Thatcher” and the lower 1930 plaque was “Erected in the mayoralty of John Boyd Thatcher 2nd”, JBT’s nephew.

The lower plaque is about the big clock installed in the building’s tower in the 1920s. City Hall was primarily designed by H. H. Richardson and is deservedly on the National Register of Historic Places. The upper plaque is the one that grabbed me seven years ago. Here’s a close-up:

The brass line on the sidewalk being a true meridian is cool, but a little weird because the location is not on an even line of longitude: as the plaque states, it’s at 73 degrees, 45 minutes and change West. The text below the latitude and longitude is even cooler, allowing conversion for the distance from 75 degrees West, which is where Eastern Standard Time is measured. (75W is close to Philadelphia if you want a major city and Oneonta if you want a New York State city.) So you can, on a sunny day in Albany, measure the time with the sundial and convert that to Eastern time. And I’m sure that the sundial is accurate enough to make the subtraction of 4’58.8″ worthwhile.

More buildings need clever, useless decoration like this.