Rockefeller Center Rises

A COLOR RENDERING of Rockefeller Plaza by John Wenrich, 1932 (left)

AN ARCHITECTURAL PLAN of Rockefeller Center’s landscaped rooftops and gardens (right)

John D. Rockefeller, Jr., opted to press ahead with an all-commercial complex, roughly along the lines set forth in the old master plan but with a soaring office tower at its core in place of the concert hall. The complex would develop as a carefully planned, state-of-the-art private city within the city. It would even include its own new midblock promenade running from West 48th Street up to West 51st—an addition that created a dozen new, highly desirable corner locations for retailers. To detail this vision, a committee of three design firms set up shop together on two floors of a building next door to Grand Central Terminal under the inauspicious name of “Associated Architects.” Nonetheless, the early omens were good. With bold plans beginning to take shape, venerable Architectural Forum magazine hailed the complex as “the outstanding project” of 1932. Maybe so, but in hindsight, Wallace K. Harrison, the designer coordinating the group, described the experience as “pure hell for the architects.” Among other revelations, Harrison insisted the firms had agreed to work together only because “they were paid by Mr. Rockefeller.”

THE EXCAVATION OF the Rockefeller Center site continues on July 17, 1931. Development of the tract, purchased in 1928 by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., began May 17, 1930, and continued through 1939.

THE RCA BUILDING at 30 Rockefeller Plaza is under construction, August 1932 (left).

STEEL WORKERS TAKE a break from work on the RCA building 800 feet in the air on a crossbeam, September 1932 (above).

By that point, the project originally called Metropolitan Square in honor of the opera house slated to anchor it had a new name: Rockefeller Center. With the Great Depression deepening, that name alone promised hope of a rare continuity. Surely this grand project backed by the rich-asCroesus Rockefellers could proceed apace even as other real estate endeavors of the giddy ’20s regularly failed to fill their spaces at any rent. Even worse, the taller many of those properties stood, the more visibly they seemed to struggle. The Empire State Building down on West 34th Street opened in May 1931 and soon became the butt of jokes as “the Empty State Building.” Despite the deepening economic gloom, Associated Architects beavered on. Construction on what would be the complex’s tallest spire, the RCA Building, began in March 1932. At 70 floors, it would reach 850 feet. Work on the site of Radio City Music Hall, where demolition had begun on May 5, 1931, also continued through 1932.

DIEGO RIVERA USES charcoal to sketch the RCA Building lobby fresco (left).

FRIDA KAHLO AND Diego Rivera in their NYC hotel room considering legal action following Rivera’s banning from the RCA Building, May 11, 1933 (below).

RIVERA’S MURAL IS covered to conceal the offending Lenin likeness until it can be destroyed (below left).

ARTIST LEE LAWRIE inspects Atlas (1934–1937) during installation in the forecourt of 630 Fifth Avenue. The heroic work was a collaboration with Rene Paul Chambellan (opposite).

Elsewhere, an array of public amenities and artworks, never before seen in New York City commercial buildings, gave the complex standout status. These ranged from the gilded, gaily akimbo Prometheus at the foot of the RCA Building’s front door to the lush Channel Gardens that lured pedestrians off Fifth Avenue with a botanical show reminiscent of Dr. Hosack’s gardens a century earlier. Even Rockefeller Center’s flops seemed to bring it more fame, most notably the murals slated for the RCA Building’s lobby. There, celebrated Mexican painter Diego Rivera had been commissioned to craft an enormous centerpiece fresco. When Rivera, a fervent Marxist, worked his way to the spot in the mural where he revealed—larger than life—a triumphant image of Soviet hero Vladimir Lenin, the Rockefellers stepped in. They took away Rivera’s paints and chiseled his art off their walls. The ensuing howls of protest were loud, but short lived.

THE PROMETHEUS FOUNTAIN, created by Paul Manship in 1934.

TWO DAYS AFTER Christmas 1932, Radio City Music Hall opens its doors to reveal 5,962 plush seats facing the world’s largest stage in a jaw-dropping Art Deco space. It is an arresting venue designed to make a statement for the whole Rockefeller Center complex. The theater also hints at an important future development, though it goes mostly unnoticed at the time: its doors open onto Sixth Avenue, where the designers anxiously anticipate the demolition of the old elevated railway—set to begin in 1938—and the dawn of a rosier commercial day.

Another daring touch, the sunken plaza in front of the RCA Building, gathered more litter than interest until management uncorked the concept of freezing a few inches of water for an ice-skating rink, open to all comers, smack-dab in the center of the city’s newest tourist attraction. Similarly, the center’s concourse level, one lightless floor below ground level, drew little attention at first, despite its dozens of shops and eateries. The ceremonial arrival of the center’s towering Christmas tree—a tradition that began officially in 1933—and legions of skaters each winter, however, soon kindled a yen for life down under. So, too, did the convenience of walking all the way from Fifth Avenue and West 48th Street as far as Sixth Avenue and West 51st Street, grabbing lunch and whatever else on the way, without ever having to venture outside into the elements. The 1940 arrival of the IND Sixth Avenue Line alongside the complex’s basements, aided by a new, Rockefeller-funded modernist subway mezzanine 20 years later, sealed the concourse’s status as a daily essential for tens of thousands of commuters and tourists.

ROCKEFELLER CENTER IS unique in New York in how it embraces being a public commons. The ice rink is an inviting attraction during the cold months (left); but the space is useful, too, in warm weather for events such as this 1948 dog show (above).

In a less sexy innovation, there was something else only the city’s largest private commercial development could offer. One more floor down from the concourse were loading docks that pulled hundreds of trucks off the streets each day via a web of industrial-scale elevators and ramps. This freed the streets up for cars, pedestrians, and a palpably more humane atmosphere. All told, the center had more bells and whistles than a Broadway musical. Still, it drew its detractors, including respected New Yorker architecture critic Lewis Mumford, who lambasted the place as “a series of bad guesses, blind stabs, and grandiose inanities.” Only over time would most observers concede that somehow it all worked, both aesthetically and functionally.

Rockefeller Center’s ramp system

IN A CITY WITHOUT ALLEYS, novel underground loading docks solve a problem created by the grid plan of 1811. Many older cities had alleys for handling goods deliveries and trash removal. In New York, without those handy back doors, that activity shifts to the streets out front. Rock Center’s subterranean alternative brings a new order and efficiency to a key slice of midtown.

RENE PAUL CHAMBELLAN (in white shirtsleeves) and Lee Lawrie (dark suit) work on The Story of Mankind (1935), a massive-scale (22-foot by 15-foot) carved and colored limestone bas-relief that depicts human progress (right).

By 1936, with tenants already at work in its towers and some clamoring for expansion space, efforts commenced on the project’s four-building Phase II. It boasted new homes for the Associated Press (at 50 Rockefeller Plaza, with a striking Isamu Noguchi sculpture—News—out front), Eastern Air Lines, and a bumptious 14-year-old magazine publisher, Time Inc., which had already outgrown its quarters at the newly constructed Chrysler Building. Foundation work at 9 Rockefeller Plaza, known as the Time & Life Building, began in the late spring of that year. By the following April, the 36-story tower, clad like all its Rock Center siblings in Indiana limestone, stood ready for business at the complex’s southern edge, on Rockefeller Plaza between West 48th and West 49th Streets. Its entrance on West 49th was renamed 1 Rockefeller Plaza. At the outset, Time Inc. took seven of its floors, plus a penthouse.

ISAMU NOGUCHI CARVES and casts his sculpture News (1940) for the Associated Press Building. The artwork was, at the time, the largestever stainless-steel casting. It shows five newsgatherers looking for a scoop (left). The entrance to the original Time & Life Building at 9 Rockefeller Plaza (now 1 Rockefeller Plaza) is set off by another Lawrie collaboration, this time with colorist Léon V. Solon for their classic Art Deco work Progress (1937) (right).

LEANING INTO THE microphone that morning at the final Rockefeller complex building dedication, Nelson confided that his father, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. “has always had a suppressed desire to drive a rivet.” November 1939 (left).

THE RCA BUILDING, brightly lit to show off its pale Indiana limestone in the city’s midtown jewel box (right).

In November 1939, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., hefted a pneumatic hammer to symbolically drive the final rivet in the U.S. Rubber Company Building fronting Sixth Avenue; it was the last of the 14 buildings slated for the center. Still, the occasion would have likely fallen far short of memorable had it not been for the center’s young new president, Nelson Rockefeller, Junior’s second-born son. He turned the day into a spectacle, with an audience of 500, honorary guests including Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and a colorfully uniformed regimental band, plus live coverage on NBC Radio. In its coverage of the ceremony, Forbes magazine trumpeted the complex’s new status as the city’s biggest visitor attraction, crediting that coup to one man: “The genius who has made Rockefeller Center uniquely attractive is Nelson A. Rockefeller. . . . Keep your eye on him.”