Rockefeller Center

Rockefeller Center is a complex of 19 commercial buildings covering 22 acres between 48th and 51st Streets in New York. Built by the Rockefeller family, it is located in the center of Midtown Manhattan, spanning between Fifth Avenue and Seventh Avenue. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1988. It is the largest privately held complex of its kind in the world, and an international symbol of architectural style blended with capitalism.

History

Rockefeller Center was named after John D. Rockefeller Jr. ("Junior"), who leased the space from Columbia University in 1928 and developed it between 1929 and 1940. Rockefeller initially planned a syndicate to build an opera house for the Metropolitan Opera Company on the site, but changed his mind after the stock market crash of 1929 and the withdrawal of the Metropolitan from the project. He took on the enormous project as the sole financier, negotiating a line of credit with the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and covering ongoing expenses through the sale of oil company stock.

Construction of the 14 buildings in the Art Deco style began in 1931 and were completed when he drove in the final rivet in 1939. Principal builder, and "managing agent", for the massive project was John R. Todd and principal architect was Raymond Hood, working with a team that included a young Wallace Harrison, later to become the family's principal architect and adviser to Nelson Rockefeller.

It was the public relations pioneer Ivy Lee, the prominent adviser to the family, who first suggested the name " Rockefeller Center" for the complex, in 1931. Junior initially didn't want the Rockefeller family name associated with the commercial project, but was persuaded on the grounds that the name would attract far more tenants.

What could have become a major controversy in the mid-1930s concerned the last of the four European buildings that remained unnamed. Attempts were made by Ivy Lee and others to rent out the space to German commercial concerns and name it the Deutsches Haus. Junior ruled this out after being advised of Hitler's Nazi march towards World War II, and thus the empty office site became the International Building North.

This subsequently became the primary location of the US operations of British Intelligence (MI6) during the War, with Room 3603 becoming the principal operations center for US intelligence, organised by William Joseph Donovan, as well as the office of the future head of what was later to become the Central Intelligence Agency, Allen Dulles.

The Center is a combination of two building complexes: the older and original 14 Art Deco office buildings from the 1930s, and a set of four International-style towers built along the Avenue of the Americas during the 1960s and 1970s (plus the Lehman Brothers Building). (The Time-Life Building, McGraw Hill and News Corporation/Fox News Channel headquarters are part of these "newer" Rockefeller Center buildings, which are now owned/managed by the major private real estate firm, Rockefeller Group.)

The entire Rockefeller Center complex was purchased by Mitsubishi Estate, a real estate company of the Mitsubishi Group, in 1989, which fully bought out Rockefeller Group. In 2000, the current owner Jerry Speyer (a close friend of David Rockefeller), of Tishman Speyer Properties, L.P., together with the Lester Crown family of Chicago, bought for $1.85 billion the older 14 buildings and land from the previous syndicated owners: Goldman Sachs (which had 50 percent ownership), Giovanni Agnelli, Stavros Niarchos, and David Rockefeller, who organized the syndicate in 1996 and is historically associated with the other partners.

Radio City Music Hall

The Radio City Music Hall was completed in December, 1932. At the time it was the largest and most opulent theater in the world. Its original name was the International Music Hall but was changed to reflect the new techonology of the time - radio. One of the complex's first and most important tenants was the Radio Corporation of America, hence the other name the Center itself was dubbed was " Radio City".

The Music Hall was planned by a consortium of three architectural firms, who employed Edward Durrell Stone to design the exterior. The interior design was given to the expert of the then European Modernist style and the expression of a new American aesthetic, Donald Deskey, who commissioned artists for the theater. It seated 6,000 people and after an initial slow start became the single biggest tourist destination in the city. In 1978 its interior was declared a New York City landmark.

The GE Building ( RCA Building)

The centerpiece of Rockefeller Center is the 70-floor, 872-foot (266-m) GE Building at 30 Rockefeller Plaza ("30 Rock") - formerly known as the RCA Building - centered behind the sunken plaza. The building is the setting for the now famous photograph taken by Charles C. Ebbets in 1932 of workers lunching on a steel beam without harnesses. The 850 feet drop lies below.

The building was renamed in the 1980s after General Electric (GE) re-acquired RCA, which it helped found in 1919. The famous Rainbow Room club restaurant is located on the 65th floor; the Rockefeller family office covers the 54-56th floors. The skyscraper is the headquarters of NBC and houses most of the network's New York studios, including the legendary Studio 8H, home of Saturday Night Live. NBC currently owns the space it occupies in the building as a condominium arrangement.

Unlike most other Art Deco towers built during the 1930s, the GE Building was constructed as a slab with a flat roof, where the Center's newly renovated observation deck, the Top of the Rock is located, which was first built in 1933. The $75 million makeover of the observation area was carried out by the Center's owner, Tishman Speyer Properties and was finally completed in 2005. It spans from the 67-70th floors and includes a multimedia exhibition exploring the history of the Center. On the 70th floor, reached by both stairs and elevator, there is a 20-foot wide viewing area, allowing visitors a unique 360-degree panoramic view of New York City.

Center Art

Rockefeller Center contains, amongst many other corporate tenants, the New York headquarters of the world's biggest auction house by revenue, Christies. The Center represents a turning point in the history of architectural sculpture: it's among the last major building projects in the United States to incorporate a program of integrated public art. Sculptor Lee Lawrie contributed the largest number of individual pieces, fourteen, including the statue of Atlas facing Fifth Avenue, and the conspicuous friezes above the main entrance to the RCA Building.

Paul Manship's highly recognizable gilded statue of Prometheus recumbent, bringing fire to mankind, features prominently in a sunken plaza which is used as an ice-skating rink during winter. The model for Prometheus was Leon Nole. Although some sources cite it as the fourth-most familiar statue in the United States, behind the Lincoln Memorial, Mount Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty, Manship was not particularly fond or proud of it.

A large number of other artists contributed work here, including Carl Milles, Hildreth Meiere, Isamu Noguchi, Margaret Bourke-White, Dean Cornwell, and Leo Friedlander. The aesthetic quality of this work varies considerably and some of its allegorical content is enigmatic.

Famously, in 1932, the Mexican socialist artist Diego Rivera (whose sponsor was MoMA and whose patron at the time was Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, the wife of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.), was commissioned by their son Nelson Rockefeller to create a color fresco for the 1,071-square-foot wall in the lobby of the then RCA Building (GE Building), after Nelson was unable to secure the commissioning of either Matisse or Picasso. Previously he had painted a controversial mural in Detroit entitled Detroit Industry, commissioned by Abby and John's friend, Edsel Ford.

Thus it came as no real surprise when Rivera's Man at the Crossroads became controversial, as it contained Moscow May Day scenes and a clear portrait of Lenin, not apparent in initial sketches. After Nelson issued a written warning to Rivera to replace the offending figure with an anonymous face, Rivera refused (after offering to counterbalance Lenin with a portrait of Lincoln), and so he was paid off and the mural papered over at the instigation of Nelson, who was to become the Center's flamboyant president. Nine months later, after all attempts to save the fresco were explored - including relocating it to Abby's Museum of Modern Art - it was destroyed as a last option.

Rivera re-created the work later in Mexico City in modified form, from a photo taken by his wife, Frida Kahlo; in it he included the figure of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. His fresco in the Center was replaced with a larger and stunning mural by the Spanish Catalan artist Jose Maria Sert, titled American Progress, depicting a vast allegorical scene of men constructing modern America, containing the figures of Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Emerson, on the west wall of the Grand Lobby of 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

In 1962, a plaque was placed at the plaza with a list of principles in which John D. Rockefeller Jr. believed in, first expressed by him in 1941. It begins with: "I believe in the supreme worth of the individual and in his right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", and includes a list of other lifelong beliefs encompassing free enterprise and religion.

Flags

At street level, the plaza has about 200 flagpoles. At varying intervals, the flags of United Nations member countries, the flags of United States states and territories, or various decorative and seasonal flags are flown; during U.S. holidays, every flagpole carries the Stars and Stripes.

The landmark buildings comprise over 8 million square feet on 12 acres in Midtown, bounded by Fifth and Sixth Avenues, and running from 48th Street to 51st Street.

* One Rockefeller Plaza - (608,000 square feet) - Formerly the Time-Life Building; an original tenant was General Dynamics, whose offices were later occupied by Lazard Frères
* 10 Rockefeller Plaza Nintendo World Store- (288,000 square feet) - Formerly the Eastern Airlines Building
* 30 Rockefeller Plaza GE Building - (2.9 million square feet) - Formerly the RCA & RCA West Buildings
* 50 Rockefeller Plaza - Bank of America Building - (481,000 square feet) - Formerly the Associated Press Building
* 75 Rockefeller Plaza
* 1230 Avenue of the Americas - Simon & Schuster Building - (706,000 square feet) - Formerly U.S. Rubber
* 1260 Avenue of the Americas - Radio City Music Hall
* 1270 Avenue of the Americas - (528,000 square feet) - Formerly the RKO Building
* 600 Fifth Avenue - (409,000 square feet) - Formerly the Sinclair Oil Building
* 610 Fifth Avenue - La Maison Francaise (130,000 square feet)
* 620 Fifth Avenue - British Empire Building (130,600 square feet)
* 626 Fifth Avenue - Palazzo d'Italia (120,000 square feet)
* 630 Fifth Avenue - International Building (1.2 million square feet)
* 636 Fifth Avenue - International Building North (120,000 square feet)

The newer buildings:

* 1211 Avenue of the Americas - Former Celanese Building
* 1221 Avenue of the Americas - McGraw- Hill Building
* 1251 Avenue of the Americas - Formerly the Exxon Building, now occupied by News Corporation
* 1271 Avenue of the Americas - Time- Life Building
* The Lehman Brothers Building.

Former buildings

* Center Theater - (formerly the RKO Roxy Theater) - demolished.
* AXA Building - (formerly the Sperry Rand Building.)
* New York Hilton & Towers.

The Concourse

One of the little known but fascinating parts of Rockefeller Center is the underground Concourse. This interconnected series of pedestrian passages stretches from 47th Street to 51st Street and from 7th Avenue to 5th Avenue. Around the skating rink access is usually through stairways from teh lobbies in the cluster of six landmark buildings. Access can also be gained through the restaurants at the skating rink, via the elevators to the north and south of the rink. The rink itself is on the concourse level. The longest straight section of concourse is under the sidewalk on the west side of Avenue of the Americas. Here the pedestrian can descend using stairways inside and in front of the Time & Life Building, 1251 Avenue of the Americas, the McGraw Hill Building and 1211 Avenue of the Americas. The concourse is a shoppers delight, containing retail shops, fast food and fine dining. The most interesting areas are the horseshoe corridor around the skating rink, and the two parallel shopping corridors just west from there, under 30 Rockefeller Plaza. In bad weather these corridors offer a convenient way to move between the Rockefeller buildings. There is also access to the B, D, F and V subway lines along 6th Avenue, and the N, R and W station at 7th Avenue and 49th Street (reached by following a winding corridor under the fountain pool, 1251 Avenue of the Americas and 745 Seventh Avenue). The southern end of the concourse opens into the public area of the 6th Avenue subway station at 47th street.

Small Parks

Two small parks are also part of western Rockefeller Center. Garden Park is located mid-block between 50th Street and 49th Street behind 1251 Avenue of the Americas. McGraw-Hill Park is located mid-block between 49th and 48th Streets behind the McGraw Hill building. They form the northern end of a string of mid-block parks that continue further downtown beyond Rockefeller Center. A not-to-be-missed sight is the walk-through fountain in McGraw-Hill park, which flows down a wall mid-park and is pierced by a circular pedestrian pass-through.

Rockefeller Center Online