Where Is the Sundial?

Sixty years ago, Columbia students passing by College Walk could not miss the most conspicuous denizen on campus: a 16-ton dark-green granite sphere that served as a sundial and sat midway between Low and Butler Library.

Then one day, with most people home for Christmas break, the majestic sphere was whisked away to a Bronx stone yard. The New York Times falsely reported that it was broken into pieces for transportation ease, but it remained intact. Fifty-five years later, an art curator in California called Steve Pulimood, CC '03, who had been involved in an effort to return the sundial to campus, and told him that the granite ball was resting in a field in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

This was the sundial presented to the University in May of 1914 by the class of 1885 on its 25th Reunion. All that remains today is the nine-foot-long circular pedestal with two curved bronze plates on top and 12 metal inserts adorning the circumference.

Harold Jacoby, an astronomer and member of the class of 1885, conceived the idea to build a sundial, and the architectural company McKim, Mead, and White designed the structure. Jacoby planned the sphere to be the stylus of the sundial. The sculptor, William Ordway Partridge, class of 1885, drew up the plans for the 12 monthly inserts along with names for each one. One of them is the rooster Chanticleer from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

With an error of never more than a fraction of a second, the edges of the oval shadow cast by the ball would fall on the platform to reveal the date at noon every day.

In 1944, the sphere began to crack as a result of natural fault lines in the rock. The University's administration removed it during the winter of 1946 for safety reasons.

Efforts were made during the end of 2001 to restore the stylus, which, according to Pulimood, would cost an estimated $250,000. In the end the project was never brought to fruition.

"I don't consider the case closed ... it's just on pause," said Pulimood. Meanwhile three Latin words inscribed on the sundial's pedestal seem to offer a bit of consolation: Horam Expecta Veniet-Await the Hour Will Come.