The Clockmaker Who Brought Cleveland Street’s Time Home

The historic Peoples Bank clock has returned to Cleveland Street. Now, a new Cleveland Street Alliance video tells the story of the master clockmaker who brought it home.

Cleveland Street’s Time Comes Home steps inside Boyd Clocks in Tampa, where antique clocks line the walls and the sounds of ticking and chiming have filled the family shop for more than 80 years.

At the center of the story is David H. Boyd, a lifelong horologist and second-generation clockmaker who has spent nearly four decades repairing and restoring timepieces.

“Horologist sounds important, but I’m just a mechanic,” Boyd says. “It happens to be clocks that I work on.”

Clockmaking runs in the family.

Boyd’s father, David N. Boyd Sr., began repairing clocks at age 14 as a way to earn extra money. He had planned to become an engineer and work for Ford Motor Company, but at 19 he contracted polio and would spend the next 66 years in a wheelchair. Unable to pursue that path, he turned his childhood skill into a profession he could practice from a workbench at home.

David grew up alongside him. As a boy, he accompanied his father on service calls, helping remove weights and pendulums from grandfather clocks and learning the mechanical craft firsthand. By 16, he was making house calls of his own.

That same family workshop is where one of downtown Clearwater’s most familiar historic landmarks spent five to six months being brought back to life.

The four-faced McClintock clock had watched over Cleveland Street for generations. By the time it arrived at Boyd Clocks, nearly a century of exposure to Florida weather had taken its toll.

The new video finds the clock not above Cleveland Street, but in pieces throughout Boyd’s shop.

Its copper roof rests on a workbench. Its heavy steel frame has been disassembled. Its original dial and nearly century-old hands are laid out as Boyd walks viewers through the anatomy of a public clock built in another era.

“These are the original clock hands,” Boyd explains. “These have been restored, so they look nice. But these are, you know, 95 years old.”

Over approximately 700 hours of work, Boyd and his team restored the clock piece by piece—preserving its original dial and hands, restoring its metalwork, creating new stained-glass panels and installing modern GPS-regulated clockworks so it can keep accurate time while retaining its historic appearance.

The video follows that craftsmanship up close as Boyd handles the original components, selects and cuts stained glass and explains how old-world materials and modern technology were brought together in a single restoration.

After months inside the workshop, the clock returned to the corner of Cleveland Street and Fort Harrison Avenue.

On July 25, Boyd stood beneath it as more than 3,000 people gathered for its public unveiling.

“Historic clocks like this don’t just keep time,” Boyd told the crowd. “They have a way of becoming part of the community.”

“To me, this clock is much more than a timepiece. It is one of the jewels of Clearwater.”

For a clockmaker who has spent much of his life working on timepieces carrying histories of their own, the Peoples Bank clock became something more than another restoration.

“Every once in a while a project comes along like this where I get to participate in the kind of resurrection, if you will, of a neighborhood, of a community,” Boyd said after the unveiling. “And I get to kind of put the cherry on the top of what’s going on here.”

For Boyd, that is ultimately what gives a public clock its meaning.

“Clocks like this become part of people’s lives,” he said. “They’re there every day, year after year, until you can’t imagine that corner without them.”

Today, Cleveland Street has its clock back.

And once again, one of the details that helped define downtown Clearwater’s past is keeping time over its future.

The new video, Cleveland Street’s Time Comes Home, is available at clevelandstreetalliance.com.