So this originally worked only wireless? Something sent information over IR and it displayed. You can likely eventually reverse engineer it but in the end you will need either an FPGA/CPLD or a full LCD segment driver to control the bare LCD. I don't think it would be worth it to me. You can buy fully documented LCDs pretty cheap.
Personally (and this is just me) I would do all I could to attempt to hack the control circuit and if I couldn't get anywhere with that, it would end up in my junk bin.
However, if you persist, your next step would be to find the "common" pin and the other 53 pins will be the segment pins. The common is likely your 96Hz pin as it would want to cycle through the segments quickly so you didn't see flicker. During each cycle, the 53 different segments will be set to on or off. So once you find the common, you can sort out the segments by driving each pin individually and noting what segment lights up (or turns off since your board is already driving it.) And again, in the end, you will need to build some circuit that can drive the 53 segments or use a segment driver. These are what you would be working with:
The question still remains... why would you see a 1HZ pulse OUTPUT going to an IR RECEIVER? Typically an IR receiver would be connected an interrupt input on a controller. My guess is that you are either just seeing noise or it is something different than you think.