Anybody who remembers the disappointment of Al Capone’s Vault, which was opened on live TV after being sealed for decades but turned out to be empty, will sympathize with the neighborhood group that has rehabilitated the Eastman tower clock monument in East Concord.

The 19-foot-tall granite obelisk at the intersection of Eastman and Portsmouth streets once had four functioning clocks but they haven’t run for decades. As part of an 18-month project to rehabilitate the monument, the group was eager to get inside the locked room in its base to see what was there – including, they hoped, the brass clockworks by the Seth Thomas company which had powered the four clock faces for a half-century or more.

“(The city) no longer had a key to the lock that was on it. … They gave us permission to cut the lock, and Doug Finney was down here in five minutes with his bolt cutters. It was akin to opening King Tut’s tomb, with the problem being the tomb robbers had been here long ago,” said Chris Miller, who kick-started the volunteer project.

“The thing was empty. All the original clockworks were gone.”

It turns out that the monument was worked on in the 1970s and things went downhill from there.

“At some point, somebody absconded with the original works,” said Finney, another neighbor long involved in the project. “I’d love to get a look at them. But they’re long gone.”

However, as part of rehab of the half-acre park where the monument sits, new electric works were purchased, using some of an $18,000 grant from the New Hampshire Council on the Arts’ grant program. They were installed Monday by Philip D’Avanza of Goffstown, a specialist in repairing large tower clocks including the one on Main Street in Concord, using a powered lift provided by the city to get up to the top of the 19-foot monument.

The granite obelisk is also being cleaned and maintenance is being done to the park’s landscaping, as an electric line was trenched to the monument. The work is being done in anticipation of the 100th anniversary of the monument’s 1924 dedication.

“That’s coincidental,” admitted Finney of the centennial. “We actually discovered that after we started.”

The rehabilitation of the little clock tower started some 18 months ago when a few neighbors got tired of walking past it in such a dilapidated shape. The city’s Parks and Recreation Department has since gotten involved.

In 1924, this site was at the center of transportation corridors into Concord from the Seacoast and points north. “All traffic into and out of Concord in those directions would have proceeded by the Eastman monument and set their time by the tower clocks,” says the Concord city website.

The monument was funded by the Eastman Family Memorial Association to honor Ebenezer Eastman, one of the original European settlers to the area.

For its size, the park is loaded with history. It has a State Historical Highway Marker noting the site to be the terminus of the original New Hampshire Turnpike, while another marker notes the site as the location of original Merrimack River crossings (Eastman Ferry 1727, Tucker Ferry 1785, Federal Bridge 1799) and a third marker tells of the location of the Rumford garrison house, established for the protection of the earliest colonial settlers.

The granite for the clock tower monument was quarried at the Granite State Quarry on Rattlesnake Hill, now part of Swenson Granite. The monument was made by the New England Granite Works in Westerly, Rhode Island.

David Brooks can be reached at dbrooks@cmonitor.com