Fred W. Jensen & Son Watchmakers was the name of Fred's shop. The signage noted it was established in 1884. The Forward's article described the street as having one side replete with shops "filled with dungarees, compasses, sou'westers, pea-jackets" and marine necessities, as the location was close to the docks. 'Sou'westers' were oilskin rain hats, with long flaps designed to keep your neck dry in a rainstorm or lashings of waves as you sail. Ahoy West Street!

Nearby Jensen's NY Watch Museum was Pier 20, a busy dock where both freight bearing ships were unloaded, and passenger ships with touring vacationers as well as returning city residents docked. It's not hard to imagine a newcomer to the city or a sailor with time off, easily wandering from the pier right into Jensen's.

Fred Jensen's watchmaking talents were honed in his native Copenhagen, Denmark. where his father was, the NYT noted "one of the last of the guild watchmakers" there. Jensen trained with the guild prior to immigrating to America in 1881, opening his shop on West Street in 1900. As Jensen told it, his apprenticeship was nearly seven years long, in the days before watches were factory made. The Danish embassy can be found today, in the Chrysler building, seen above.

Jensen had company in his field, in his chosen city. The Horological Society of New York founded in 1866, the country's first watchmaker's organization, still meets regularly for lectures and fellowship at the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, one of the city's oldest libraries.

In the Forward's 1928 piece about Jensen's museum, all kinds of mechanical toys he'd created were described, including a blacksmith. " Mr. Jensen is forever making new kinds of clocks or toys run by clockwork." Forward writer Gene Lisitzky wrote, describing several of them: a clock carved out of coconut and even a moveable comic strip featuring all types of moving folks populating the strip and all moving at once. Lisitzky described the mechanical blacksmith actually shoeing a horse, as well as a barber shaving a customer, a bootblack shining a customer's shoes and a meta- mechanical of a watchmaker fixing a watch. Today in the city one can still find a blacksmith nearby Gowanus canal and 9th Street, pictured above.

Jensen's watch repair shop and artful clock museum not only made the Forward's "Roundabout" column in 1928, but were noted twice in the "Talk of the Town" feature in The New Yorker in 1927 and then again in 1935. The New Yorker was originally located in the building featured in the image above, but currently is housed downtown in the World Trade sector, nearby Jensen's old museum.

Not only was Fred Jensen's watch making art and talents noted in print publications of his time, but the New Yorker noted that Movietone News, whose flagship is located on Sixth Ave near this image above, had cast him in one of their newsreels at the time. This excited Jensen not least, they noted, because his Danish relatives saw him in it and could thereby better envision his New York City life. Along with wind up wristwatches, Jensen's magical mechanical world remains mostly in the archives of long standing city publications such as The New Yorker and the Forward. and in our collective imaginations. But perhaps in the words of this 1939 movietone newsreel about the city entitled: New York the Wonder City, "the birds are not forgotten when the snow lies deep." Recently, a poem about him, inspired by this same Forward archival photo inspiring this story here, was published in local Upstate Sullivan County newspaper The River Reporter. You can read it here.