"if you had to meet a stranger in New York City on a specific day, with no way to communicate beforehand, where would you go?"
The answer to that in San Francisco was once "meet me by the clock", which is in the lobby of the St. Francis Hotel.[1]
"There’s no easy way to sugarcoat this, so I’ll just come out and say it: it is possible that the entirety of California is built on top of one immensely large organism, and the particular spot in which the Westin St. Francis Hotel stands—335 Powell Street, San Francisco, 94102—is located directly above its beating heart."
That clock is a master clock, synchronizing the other clocks in the hotel. In the past, the synchronizing signals from that clock drove some other clocks in the downtown area. So it really is the beating heart of the city.
The clock was recently overhauled, and is acting as the master clock again. For years, the hotel's time signals were coming from an electric motor clock and then a quartz time standard. But they've reverted to the pendulum clock. Error is about 5 seconds a month.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGK_OaMVPUs
> The clock was recently overhauled, and is acting as the master clock again. For years, the hotel's time signals were coming from an electric motor clock and then a quartz time standard. But they've reverted to the pendulum clock. Error is about 5 seconds a month.
Can't anyone donate them a retired Cesium clock? Or, at least, a GPS receiver.
Edinburgh has a similar concept: the "Binns Clock". Although Binns no longer exists, the clock is still there.