Tour of the Bromo Seltzer Tower

Haven't made it over for a tour of the tower?  No problem.  Built in 1911, and standing at 288.7 ft tall, the Bromo Seltzer tower is probably THE iconic building of Baltimore.  Click Here for a bit of info on Bromo Seltzer (the Product).  The building was designed after the Palazzo Vecchio building in Florence, Italy...what do you think?

Palazzo Vecchio building in Florence, Italy

The lobby of the building has been turned into a bit of a shop for the Arts Program inside.  The interesting thing here is the elevators.  One is an original with windows facing outside (so you can see outside as you go up) and the other is a 1970's nightmare elevator.  Can you guess which one breaks all the time?

Notice anything missing?

If you're lucky enough to make it to the top floor in the nightmare elevator, the views are pretty good.  One neat thing is if you look in the original elevator with the door open, you can see straight down the tower in the 2 inch gap (and yet I still find this one more comforting for some reason).

Mind the gap

Now the really interesting part of the tower is just a 2 story ladder climb away!  While the clock itself is two levels down from the roof, it's the best part of the tower.  The level above the clock room used to be a radio room of some kind, and is apparently the best location for an evil lair in the city...if you can shoo away all the birds.

Hill Valley?  Great Scott!

Modern Electronics.  They jump out of position with a loud crack every few seconds.

The Light boxes (see below) provide the clock faces with their glow at night.  When the color needs to be changed to Orange or Purple for different events in town, all that's needed is to duck tape some gels to the front (not a joke...that's really all they do).

The clock mechanism is fairly straightforward (and smaller than I thought it would be).  The part here that has been taken out of action is the weight that usually rocks back and forth to keep time.  You can see the rod going through the floor that used to do this.  Apparently the building sway would throw this off and cause the clock to go out of sync.

Every day the clock must be "wound", causing the hands to move around backwards.  Apparently the Orioles had someone call the tower when it would happen during warmups in previous years...baseball players are very superstitious, and everyone thought it was a bad omen.

And the views from the top:

If you're interested in taking a tour yourself, the tower is open once a month.  The next open house is January 7th, 2012...Click Here for more info.  Make sure to show up early to sign up for a tour of the clock tower.  The rest of the building can be toured by yourself by taking the elevator up to the top and walking down through each floor.