  We show that 't Hooft's representation of (2+1)-dimensional gravity in terms
of flat polygonal tiles is closely related to a gauge-fixed version of the
covariant Hamiltonian lattice theory. 't Hooft's gauge is remarkable in that it
leads to a Hamiltonian which is a linear sum of vertex Hamiltonians, each of
which is defined modulo $2 \pi$. A cyclic Hamiltonian implies that ``time'' is
quantized. However, it turns out that this Hamiltonian is {\it constrained}. If
one chooses an internal time and solves this constraint for the ``physical
Hamiltonian'', the result is not a cyclic function. Even if one quantizes {\it
a la Dirac}, the ``internal time'' observable does not acquire a discrete
spectrum. We also show that in Euclidean 3-d lattice gravity, ``space'' can be
either discrete or continuous depending on the choice of quantization. Finally,
we propose a generalization of 't Hooft's gauge for Hamiltonian lattice
formulations of topological gravity dimension 4.
