The 17th floor of the Bromo Seltzer Tower is dominated by mammoth cast-iron clockworks: massive gears; a labyrinth of intersecting cranks, chains, and poles connecting the central workings to the hands of each of the clocks; and a series of old-fashioned-looking circuit boards. At first, the whole thing looks like something out of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times—except it is decidedly no longer modern. As the sun shines through the four clock faces, the nearly motionless machinery casts distorted shadows across the floor. The atmosphere of the room is, in fact, more like the ominous expressionism of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

When Capt. Isaac Emerson, the inventor of the Bromo Seltzer headache remedy, built the Tower in 1911, it was the tallest building in the city, especially with the 51-foot lit-up, rotating replica of a Bromo Seltzer bottle on top. (It was removed in 1936.) In 1969, the city began using the landmark building as overflow office space, but eventually it fell into a period of vacant disrepair. A private consortium purchased the tower in 2006 and placed it under the management of the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts (BOPA). The building now houses 33 artist studios, which will be open to the public on Nov. 5, when Baltimore will also have a chance to glimpse the most fascinating part of this historic building: The clock room itself will be transformed into an installation.

It all began with Joe Wall, the tower’s manager. Wall managed building maintenance at the American Visionary Art Museum before he started working at the tower in 2009 and was keen for the artistic opportunities his new job presented. “When I first saw the ground glass on the clock faces, I immediately knew I had to find someone who could project through them,” Wall says. He met Kelley Bell, a local animator and projectionist who agreed to create a series of projections for the Tower’s centennial.

This summer, Bell projected a series of short animations called “The Clock Strikes 100” through three of the four clock faces.

For the project, Bell created five different animations to light up the clock faces each night from within. In order to be seen from far below, the images needed to be particularly simple and clear. In one, moving pupils and lids turned the clocks into giant blinking eyes looking out over the city. Another sent seltzer bubbles with woozy-looking faces upward over the face of the clocks as if they were glasses of water. A century ago, people could see the lit-up tower from 20 miles away. Despite drastic changes to the skyline, Bell’s projections can still be viewed from far along Eutaw, across Lombard, and from I-95. “That’s the closest I’ve ever come to feeling like I’ve made it,” she says of seeing her work from the highway.

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