BANGOR — In the heart of the city’s downtown, the approach of the noon hour is now ushered in with the familiar Westminster Chimes melody that rings out each day from the stately brick Unitarian-Universalist Church on Park Street.

The clock and chimes had separately served local worshippers since the early 1920s, when they were installed in the twin towers of the city’s former First Universalist Church, built in the 1890s and rebuilt at the same site after the Great Bangor Fire of 1911.

For a reason that is unclear today, it wasn’t until this spring that the clock and its 10 cast-iron bells — one octave plus two notes — were connected, as their maker intended them to be.

As a result of a recent restoration project, the clock and chimes now are linked by an electrical cable and are programmed to ring out daily from 11:15 a.m. to noon, according to Natalie Gregory, chairman of the congregation’s church council. Previously, the chimes were rung manually only on Sundays and Christmas Eve.

Each day at 11:15 a.m., the first four notes of the Westminster melody sound out. At 11:30, eight notes gong. Fifteen minutes later, 12 notes ring out, and at noon, “the whole shebang of 16 notes” is played, Gregory said.

“We’re thrilled,” Gregory said of the congregation’s reaction to the project. “Now we can proclaim our presence to the city of Bangor every noon.”

The chimes can be operated manually or by an electric motor that moves weights tied to clappers.

According to Gregory, the clock and chimes were the gift of James Adams, who with his family worshipped around the turn of the century at Bangor’s First Universalist Church, which in the fall of 1995 merged with the former Unitarian congregation on Union Street to become the community’s Unitarian-Universalist congregation.

When Adams’ wife, Addie, passed away a few years later, she left the church an endowment fund for the maintenance of the clock and chimes.

The connection was part of a cleaning and overhaul project recently completed by Paul Rioux, a Winterport clocksmith specializing in antique clock repair who was commissioned by the congregation.

“It’s a tremendous piece of work,” Rioux said of the U-U church’s clock and chime combo this week. Rioux, whose prior projects include the clock at the Hammond Street Congregational Church and Winterport’s town clock, is proprietor of Peter and the Baldwin Sisters Clock Repair and Antiques in Winterport. His work has taken him as far from home as New Hampshire.

According to Rioux, the clock and chimes were made in 1920 by the manufacturing company founded by renowned Connecticut clockmaker Seth Thomas, who according to an online biography was born in 1785 and died in 1859.

Thomas was a pioneer in the development of new clock technology and in the mass production of clocks. By the time the church’s clock was made in 1920, the founder’s grandson Seth E. Thomas Jr. was company president.

Rioux said such clocks and chimes once were common in New England’s cities and towns. Bangor, he said, is fortunate that a handful of historic church clocks have escaped the forces of urban renewal.