Ansonia Clock Company, undated. Anson Green Phelps founded the Ansonia Brass Company in 1844, and six years later the Ansonia Clock Company was founded in Connecticut as a subsidiary of the parent company. For the next eight decades, Ansonia was one of the major clock manufacturers in the United States. This clock factory, which occupied much of the block between Seventh and Eighth Avenues and 12th and 13th Streets, opened in 1879. The factory is lost to a terrible fire in 1880 and rebuilt in the same location the following year. The company condensed its production into Brooklyn in the mid-1880s. 1914 was a banner year for the firm which was then producing 440 different clock models. The war years were hard on the business and they never fully recovered, particularly with new competition in the novelty clock market. The Ansonia Clock Company sold this building in 1926 and sold the business to Soviet Russian interests in 1929. Today the building is a co-op called Ansonia Court.