Look up, and a clock face fifteen feet wide stares back, its minute hand alone weighing five hundred pounds. The Bromo Seltzer Tower was built in 1911 by Isaac Emerson, the chemist who invented Bromo-Seltzer antacid, as the headquarters of the Emerson Drug Company — and as a giant advertisement for his product. The tower was modeled on the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy, but with a crucial Baltimore twist: at the top, where the Florentine original has a battlemented roofline, Emerson placed a fifty-one-foot-tall blue glass bottle of Bromo-Seltzer, lit from within and rotating slowly, visible for miles across the city.
The bottle was removed in 1936 when it became structurally unsafe; photographs of the tower with its bottle show one of the great pieces of commercial architecture in American history. The building rises 289 feet and has the largest four-faced gravity-powered clock in the world — the faces are fifteen feet in diameter and the minute hands weigh five hundred pounds each. The clock was the first to be lit electrically in Baltimore, making it visible throughout the night.
Today the tower has been converted into studio spaces for artists, its floors divided into working studios that can be visited during open studio events. The blue color of Bromo-Seltzer glass is the particular shade of cobalt that used to appear in medicine bottles throughout America.