A Sidewalk Clock Standing Proudly in Queens Gets a Restoration Local leaders raised the funds, but mysteriously, there was no record of what the battered timepiece looked like when it was installed more than 100 years ago. In search of lost time: the provenance of the rare ornate clock at Jamaica Avenue and Union Hall Street was a longstanding mystery until researchers recently discovered a similar model in a 1908 catalog of a long-vanished Brooklyn manufacturer.Credit...Photographs by Stefano Ukmar for The New York Times April 30, 2021 On a busy strip of Jamaica Avenue in Queens, where vendors hawk cellphone cases outside shops selling off-price wigs, tattoo services and fungal-nail care, stands one of downtown Jamaica’s most dignified residents. This street-corner denizen is an ornate cast-iron sidewalk clock, more than a century old, attired with archaic formality like a proud codger who still wears his threadbare suit every day, even as the world passes him by.