CLEVELAND HEIGHTS — From several blocks away, the clock tower atop Cleveland Heights High School seems frozen in 1926, when builders raised it 92 feet above the farm fields and new subdivisions of one of Cleveland's outermost suburbs.

The landmark is forever young, too, in the simple and graceful line drawing of the logo that graces the letterhead, Web pages and other officialdom of the Cleveland Heights-University Heights City School District.

Get closer, though, and you will see the face is aged, and the venerable is vulnerable.

The skin of paint is desiccated, sagging and wrinkled. The elaborate wooden molding around the peeling wooden face is weather beaten, cracking and rotting. Some of the steel framework that supports the timeless timepiece is exposed to the elements and rusting dangerously, a consulting engineer recently discovered.