New London Tube: Meet Me At The Clock Tower

A video uploaded recently to YouTube features a small fraction of a video once sold by Save Ocean Beach as a fundraiser for the city's southernmost tourist destination.

An column gave a bit of history on and how the . According to its website, Save Ocean Beach is a nonprofit organization formed in 1999 with a mission to "encourage and support  those activities that will further enhance, protect and preserve its beloved Ocean  Beach Park, and to assure that present and future generations will have the continued opportunity to enjoy the open space, beauty and wonders of Ocean Beach Park in years to come." The group meets monthly and holds a number of fundraising and other activities.

According to this article in The Day, the video "Meet Me At The Clock Tower" premiered in the summer of 2000. Featuring 30 minutes of scenes from the beach (pre- and post-hurricane) and interviews with people who grew up there, it was produced by Save Ocean Beach and O'Neill VideoWorks of East Lyme. It's unclear whether you could get a copy of the video for yourself, but for $25 you got a seat at the premiere.

It seems several reels used in the production were discovered by chance as employees were cleaning storage rooms in the late 90s. The footage was aired on public access television, and Pfizer offered monetary assistance to transfer it to videotape.

The iconic clock tower itself, once located at the boardwalk, had something of an inauspicious end. Our own Elissa Bass wrote back in 1988 about how it needed hundreds of thousands of dollars in work to repair corrosion. The next year, the tower collapsed as it was being laid down for refurbishment and vanished into the scrapyard. It's been missing from the beach ever since, though the recent on site has kept the clock tower alive in discussions.

What are your memories of the Ocean Beach clock tower?

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