Two years ago, downtown Budapest’s Nyugati Square received a long-overdue refurbishment that included the modernization of its central public clock – an iconic oversized timepiece shaped like a metal mushroom, which had functioned in this location since the 1980s with a rotating display of synchronized light bulbs. With the renovation’s completion, this clock was proudly reborn with a digitalized circular display surface featuring moving multicolored content, heralding a new era for this city-center plaza… but then, for no obvious reason, this timepiece went dark during last winter.

In February we reported that two brand-new public clocks in major Budapest squares were not functioning for reasons left mysterious by city officials; within weeks of our article’s publication, the timepiece in Buda’s Széll Kálmán Square was working again. However, the clock at Nyugati Square – which had just been modernized in 2015, along with the rest of this bustling city-center plaza – remained out of order for many months since then, with no explanation provided as to why a freshly installed digital clock at a major urban transport hub would be left nonoperational for so long.

However, in recent days we happened to notice that the Nyugati Square clock now seems to be running again, as the time and date continually spin for public display night and day, which is great… but upon closer inspection, it is obvious that the clock itself has not been repaired, but instead an additional series of aligned LED screens has been semi-permanently affixed with support poles mounted all the way around the clock, and this second layer of screens is what passersby see while hurrying through the plaza.

Obviously a fair amount of planning and expense went into jury-rigging the clock like this, so it appears that this solution is expected to suffice for the foreseeable future, although at least one of the new LED screens is already malfunctioning (providing the only color now visible on the display), and the exposed wiring behind the screens seems rather vulnerable to rain, heightening the risk of future electrical problems.

While it would’ve been preferable for the original two-year-old wraparound clock screen to be properly repaired, we certainly hope that the Nyugati Square clock will continue to operate with this MacGyver-style solution with no further technical difficulties; after all, this clock seemed to work just fine back when the rotating display was illuminated with the 19th-century technology of incandescent light bulbs, even during extreme weather conditions of decades past, such as the cruelly cold winter of 1987…

And looking back a little further, we can see that a previous public clock at Nyugati Square was placed atop a particularly cool tobacco stand in the 1930s:

…actually, we wish that this neon-lit kiosk and its old analog clock were still there – such handcrafted applied artistry is much cooler than any LED display, and like another old kiosk in Óbuda, it would be an ideal site for a 21st-century new-wave coffee place!