For decades, people have streamed through the vaulted halls of Grand Central Terminal with one eye on the clock. Tucked inside the landmark, behind the bustle of commuters and tourists, sits a different relationship with time altogether. At Grand Central Watch, owner Steve Kivel has spent much of his life restoring it.
He took over the family business his father inherited from his own father—a watch repair shop opened in 1952 in a cramped Grand Central space where his grandfather reportedly worked 10-hour days in suffocating summer heat. The work has demanded sacrifice and a lot of time: mornings beginning before dawn, long hours, and decades spent preserving objects most people see simply as accessories. For Kivel, they’ve always been something else entirely.
“What makes a watch special, what makes it beautiful, it has to be the story,” Kivel says in the new Time Remembered documentary (above) produced by Illumin8 films in partnership with Grand Central Watch about the restoration of Art Carney’s watch. “To have history behind a watch is more beautiful than the watch most of the time.”
The timepiece—a gold triple-calendar chronograph by Baume & Mercier—was gifted to actor Art Carney by his longtime co-star and friend, Jackie Gleason. Just a few years before he passed, Carney handed the watch over to his son. “One day he called me over,” Brian Carney recalls. “‘I want to show you something.’ I said, ‘Oh God, it’s beautiful, Dad. Thank you so much.’ And he said, ‘Turn it over.'” It was engraved, “To Art Carney, with great admiration. From, Jackie Gleason.”
For those familiar with the television icons, that would be a mic drop moment. To younger audiences, Carney may require introduction. Before ensemble sitcoms like Seinfeld, before oddball sidekicks became television staples, there was Ed Norton—the sewer worker with boundless optimism played by Carney on The Honeymooners. The actor’s chemistry with Jackie Gleason helped define early television comedy and influence generations that followed. As Kivel puts it in the film: “That show paved the way for all of the comedy we have today: King of Queens, Everybody Loves Raymond, Seinfeld. I mean Art Carney created Kramer.”
Yet according to his son Brian, Art Carney was never particularly comfortable with being a celebrity. “He preferred to be up in Connecticut by the shore,” Brian says in the film. After his father died, Brian discovered boxes of mementos in the attic—objects and memories from a man who largely kept Hollywood at arm’s length when he was off the clock. During production, the filmmakers at Illumin8 digitized deteriorating reels and recovered footage Brian had never seen of his father. Old recordings resurfaced and forgotten moments were returned.
The documentary follows Kivel as he restores the watch. Brining timekeepers back to life is something he’s done multiple times over roughly three decades. He has restored everything from Edgar Allan Poe’s pocket watch to an Apollo 14 astronaut’s timepiece and even the famed Submariner worn in The Spy Who Loved Me. But this watch had particularly special meaning to him as a die-hard fan of The Honeymooners. “We had a lot of celebrity clients, obviously, being so many years in the store in the midtown Manhattan, like a lot of people, but to me, Brian was always the biggest celebrity,” Kivel tells Robb Report. “That’s the honest truth. That’s how I genuinely felt because of the love and admiration I had for his father.”
Their friendship stretches back decades. Kivel first met Brian in the 1990s, long before he brought this iconic piece of history into the shop. It began with him bringing in some WWI military watches in for repair and a great camaraderie developed over time. “Brian, to me, is no longer a customer,” Kivel says. “He’s a friend and someone I greatly look up to.”
The project, of course, is much more than the restoration of a watch. It is an exploration of inheritance, remembrance, and the ways in which fathers shape sons. Brian followed his father into entertainment work, doing voiceovers and commercials (including landing a lucrative gig with Geiko). Kivel followed his own father and grandfather into watchmaking, taking over the store they ran before him. Two men, from different worlds, colliding with versions of the same story.
The importance of lineage is inherent to Grand Central Watch, and they often do more than just fix your heirloom. Customers can receive books documenting a watch’s history with blank pages in the back where future generations and custodians can write their names to continue the legacy of the treasured object. “We did one once where there were six names in the back,” Kivel recalls. “So it was the current owner’s great, great, great grandfather’s watch. How cool is that? That watch been through six generations.”
The new film is an extension of the books they give to customers. It takes the idea one step further. Clients can create their own films with illumin8 for roughly $15,000, which includes about one and a half to two shoot days, postproduction, and final delivery. “Brian Carney had film reels that were starting to deteriorate, that he had never opened,” Adam Warner, a videographer with Illumin8 says of Art Carney’s old footage. “He had no idea what was on that. So we had to find ways. We’ve got our digitization, but we also work with a couple of local partners that were able to recover it, and Brian was able to see footage of his father he’d never seen before.”
The result is a kind of time capsule. For Brian, it’s not only an oral history and tribute for his family, but also a meaningful documentation of the timepiece’s provenance. He entrusts the watch to safeguarded by Kivel and says it will likely one day end up in a museum.
Ultimately, the film will a custodian of the stories that surround the watch for future generations. “When both of us watched the video, all I kept thinking about was Brian’s kids and his grandchildren,” Laura Kivel says. “Both of us said, ‘Wow, that is an amazing gift to be able to tell his story and his father’s story in his own voice, in a way that attaches to things that they can touch and that they can experience.’ I would love to hear my grandmother’s voice telling me her story.”
She has seen firsthand what restored watches can mean: a 9/11 widow hearing the ticking of her deceased spouse’s timepiece brought back to life; customers reconnecting with relatives they never met. After Steve restored a watch belonging to her late grandfather early in their relationship, she remembers studying it and imagining the ordinary gestures of his life—checking the hour, deciding where to go next.
Ultimately, it’s not the watch that matters most, but what it carries forward. “Only love lasts,” Brian’s mother used to say—a phrase now memorialized on Art Carney’s tombstone. Who can argue with that? Long after fame fades and possessions change hands, stories endure. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, they tick on for another generation.