For the time conscious - and challenged - commuter, the Bromo Seltzer Tower clock has been invaluable. Stark against the sky, it offered assurance that you would get to where you had to be in time. Or on time. Punctual, an old professor once said.

And if you fell in with the latecomers, an impulse to step on it never followed derision or complaint. It may have been encouraged, the clock's big wooden hands so seriously set at keeping time.

Whether driving east, west, north or south, the commuter only had to look up to know the time, the day moving slowly and steadily across the clock face. Linger too long and you would be transported to a piazza in Florence, waiting for the bell tower to chime and the hour's imperative: lunch, a walk in the park, an afternoon espresso, vespers. Then the light changes, a horn honks and you find yourself back at Russell and Paca streets.

The clock comes into view, sandwiched between the newest hotel under construction and the green glass skin of the latest apartment high-rise. The Bromo Seltzer Tower, even without its trademark violet blue bottle, is unmistakable. Built in the image of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, the tower at Eutaw and Lombard provides a glimpse of time from every direction.

It is a historic landmark, so too its timepiece. After years as an office building, the tower is an urban arts center; artists work there now, in newly renovated studios.

But somehow during the renovation, the clock tower lost time, from every vantage point, and then the southern clock face stopped entirely last summer. A clock mechanic from Kittery Point, Maine, arrived, but the correct time eluded him.

Construction dust and later a burned-out motor were to blame. And then the clock hands started to malfunction, and now, the clocks have been shut down until an engineer from Annapolis can pay a call.

It hasn't bothered Patricia Truitt, an artist in the tower. An abstract painter who has been known to work 12 hours in her studio, Ms. Truitt says, "When I'm in there, I try not to wear a watch. When I'm truly painting, there is no time."

But a working Bromo Seltzer clock is an animated clock, and it signals a vital city. Until the clock repairs are made, the time-conscious and time-challenged will have to bide their time, rely on their interior clocks, cell phones or hourly car-radio broadcasts to get them where they're going.

There's a life lesson here: Time goes, you say? Ah no, alas, time stays, we go. (Henry Austin Dobson)

Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. (William Faulkner)

Time is what we want most, but what we use worst. (William Penn)

Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away. (Charles Caleb Colton)

Consider the possibilities: Time is what you make it.