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Rockefeller Center

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Lower Plaza at Rockefeller Center.

Rockefeller Center is a complex of 19 commercial buildings covering 22-acres between 48th and 51st Streets in New York. It is located in the center of Midtown Manhattan, spanning between Fifth Avenue and Seventh Avenue. It is the largest privately held complex of its kind in the world, and an international symbol of commerce and capitalism. Rockefeller Center is a combination of two building complexes: the older 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. (The Time-Life Building and the News Corporation/Fox News Channel headquarters are part of the "newer" Rockefeller Center buildings.)

The entire Rockefeller Center complex was purchased by Mitsubishi Estate, a real estate company of the Mitsubishi Group, in 1989. In 2000, Jerry Speyer (a close friend of David Rockefeller), of Tishman Speyer Properties, L.P., together with the Lester Crown family of Chicago, bought out for $1.85 billion the previous owners: Goldman Sachs (which owned half the complex), the Giovanni Agnelli family, Stavros Niarchos and David Rockefeller.

Contents

[edit] History

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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 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 withdrawal of the Metropolitan from the project. Construction of buildings in the Art Deco style began in 1931. Principal architect for the complex was Raymond Hood, working with a team that included a young Wallace Harrison.

It was the PR pioneer Ivy Lee, the prominent advisor 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.<ref>Ivy Lee and naming the Center - see Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center, New York: Viking Press, 2003. (p. 258)</ref>

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 Deutches 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.<ref>Ibid., (pp.282-5)</ref>

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.<ref>Forerunner of the CIA in the Center - Ibid., (p411); James Srodes, Allen Dulles: Master of Spies, Washington: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1999. (p.207, 210)</ref>

[edit] Radio City Music Hall

The nation's largest indoor theater, Radio City Music Hall, is located in the complex. One of the complex's first and most important tenants was the Radio Corporation of America, hence the original names "Radio City" and "Radio City Music Hall."

[edit] The GE Building (RCA Building)

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The centerpiece of Rockefeller Center is the 71-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 RCA building is the setting for the now famous composite photograph taken by Charles C. Ebbets in 1932 of workers lunching on a steel beam without harnesses. The 800 feet drop lies below. It was renamed in the 1980s after General Electric (GE) re-acquired RCA, which it helped found in 1919. 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 condominum 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 observation deck, Top of the Rock, is located. The famous Rainbow Room club restaurant is located on the 65th floor.

[edit] Art

Rockefeller 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 the Mexican socialist artist Diego Rivera was commissioned to create a fresco for the lobby of the RCA Building, but his Man at the Crossroads became controversial because it contained a portrait of Lenin, and was removed from the building at the instigation of Nelson Rockefeller. Rivera re-created the work later in Mexico City in modified form. His fresco was replaced by a mural by the artist Jose Maria Sert depicting giants hurling tree trunks at each other.

[edit] Flags

Image:BirdsEyeRockPlaza.JPG

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.

[edit] Buildings

The landmarked 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 Streets.

[edit] Former Building

[edit] Further reading

  • Balfour, Alan. Rockefeller Center: Architecture as Theater, New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1978.
  • Deal, Martha. "Who Posed for the Statue of Prometheus" (Ray Van Cleef and Leon Nole). Iron Game History. Volume 6, Issue 4, Pages 34-35.
  • Harr, John Ensor, and Peter J. Johnson. The Rockefeller Century: Three Generations of America's Greatest Family, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988.
  • Karp, Walter. The Center: A History and Guide to Rockefeller Center, New York: American Heritage Publishing Company, Inc., 1982.
  • Krinsky, Carol Herselle. Rockefeller Center, New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
  • Loth, David G. The City Within a City: The Romance of Rockefeller Center, New York: Morrow, 1966.
  • Okrent, Daniel. Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center, New York: Viking Press, 2003.
  • Reich, Cary. The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer 1908-1958 New York: Doubleday, 1996.

[edit] See also

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[edit] References

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[edit] Gallery

Prometheus at Rockefeller Center
Lower Plaza of Rockefeller Center in March 2006.
The GE Building at night
4th of July (U.S. flags).
View north from 30 Rock's Top of the Rock.
Looking south from Top of the Rock.
Atlas Statue at Rockefeller Center.

[edit] External links

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