By Corinne LestchThe Daily Northwestern
Time is ticking away until an Evanston Victorian home is converted into a museum filled with antique clocks and Tiffany stained glass.
After about four meetings, Kenilworth resident and real estate investor Cameel Halim won Evanston City Council’s approval to put his own personal collection of about 500 clocks, watches, chronometers, regulators and other timepieces on display. The museum is expected to open at 1560 Oak Ave. in roughly two years.
“I could have put the museum in Chicago, but I think it will be more appreciated in the North Shore,” Halim said. “Evanston is a very cultural town, and I felt it was the right place for it.”
To fit all the pieces, an addition will be built to the back of the house. It will take about a year to restore the building, he said.
Halim, who has been collecting timepieces for 30 years, collects handmade clocks made before 1900. His daughter, Nefrette, said her father’s interest in clocks is “a relatively new phenomenon.”
“My father is a very dynamic man,” she said. “When he learns about something, he wants to learn everything about it.”
Nefrette, who works for Halim’s realty company as a construction manager, encouraged him to open the museum and brokered the deal for the purchase of the building, she said.
Halim, who is in his mid-60s, takes pride in his collection and wanted to share it with the community, she said.
“The entire council thinks it’s a terrific idea,” Ald. Melissa Wynne (3rd) said. “The collection is really extraordinary, and I think that it would be very exciting for Evanston to have something so unusual and unique, and it’s also a way that we get to preserve that building.”
About one-quarter of Halim’s collection came from a former time museum in Rockford, Ill., where the owner auctioned his pieces in New York. He acquired the Tiffany windows from churches, private owners and auctions.
“Normally people are very interested and their curiosity is piqued by a time museum, but you can’t underestimate the rarity and beauty of the stained glass as well,” Nefrette said.
Nefrette said her father is an engineer by trade, and that the combination of artistry and science is a major reason why he finds clocks so fascinating.
Halim said one of his most valuable clocks is made with intricate jewels, goldwork and stonework from the emperor of China’s palace in the 1700s. It plays music and has a foot-long stone elephant that moves its eyes and tail, he said.
Halim said his love of clocks is heavily based on the notion that the discovery of the concept of time is the basis of all modern civilization.
“The history of time is the history of modern civilization,” he said. “If we don’t know what the time is we don’t know anything.”
Reach Corinne Lestch at [email protected].
