The Big Wind-Up

With its low ceilings, faint sawdust smell, wood paneling, and seventies-era earth tones, Jim Fiorentino’s front office is what you’d expect of an old garage door company. Going into the larger warehouse, however, is like entering some kind of a fairytale world. It’s not just the massive, hundred-year-old Belgian band organ, decked out with painted roses and latticework—the walls of this palatially proportioned room are covered with wooden clocks, carvings, and phonographs.

“I’ve never really let on that it’s kind of a museum in here,” said Fiorentino, who closed his Minneapolis garage-door business fifteen years ago. While the surrounding Warehouse District was going condo-crazy, Fiorentino was remodeling his old workplace into a showcase for his hobbies. He walked among rows of display cases filled with World War I-era bayonets; nearby, shelves swayed under the weight of woodcarvings from Polynesia, China, Thailand, and other myriad corners of the globe. Pointing to the top of a bookcase, he noted several renderings of horses done by his father with a pocketknife.

Clocks, however, are a particular passion of Fiorentino’s. By way of instruction, he held up a photograph of a carved French clock, comparing its “shoddy workmanship” to the sharper edges carved by more detail-oriented Germans. “Sloppy!” he said, shaking his head at the photo. A motley collection on the warehouse’s longest wall—some 140 feet—includes ornately carved “gingerbread” clocks that adorned American kitchens a hundred years ago, and a single, amazing nineteenth-century Japanese model that vaguely resembles a cuckoo and keeps time using the sun.

An awe-inspiring assortment of cuckoos, many of which Fiorentino restored himself, dates back to 1840. The most prized ones hang in a small corridor off the main room. “These are all cuckoo and quails,” Fiorentino said, maneuvering the hands of one clock to show how it would produce the wail of a quail every fifteen minutes, and a cuckoo on the hour. Another string of cuckoos, made in Germany during the late 1800s, features images of strung-up pheasant and chamois carcasses. “I get people in here saying ‘I don’t like the dead animals on that clock!’” Fiorentino said, a bit peevishly. “But the folks who made it were hunters. That’s how they survived. This is what they knew.”

He brightened up after turning toward a festive clock, one of the largest in the place. “This here is my lady friend’s favorite,” he said, running his fingers across its leafy ornamentation and pointing out a sprightly, avian version of a nativity scene. “She likes the birdies in the nest there.”

Returning to his front office, Fiorentino admitted that “some of my friends call me cuckoo Jim.” But when it came to explaining why he’d bothered to amass such a collection, he struggled. “I just … how should I say it … I like cuckoo clocks!”—Christy DeSmith