A Modernist Model

From the staging alone, passersby on the afternoon of May 16, 1957, could have guessed that the hubbub across the avenue from Radio City Music Hall had something to do with Rockefeller Center. After all, only the Rockefellers could have brought together on one barren, block-long site a German band featuring five Tyrolean tootlers, a bevy of television news cameras, an audience of several hundred, and two men in business suits and white gloves wielding jackhammers: Center board chair Nelson Rockefeller and Time Inc. editor in chief Henry R. Luce. In his speech that day, Rockefeller hailed their groundbreaking for the new Time & Life Building as the “most important moment” for the Center since his father had decided to go ahead with his commercial city within the city in the darkest days of the Depression. This would be not just another tower, the complex’s 16th. It would be the first to rise up on the far side of Sixth Avenue. For decades, anything west of Sixth Avenue was on the wrong side of the tracks. The Sixth Avenue elevated train that had long blighted the area was closed in late 1938 and completely razed by April 1939. In 1945, to mark the transformation, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia rechristened Sixth Avenue the Avenue of the Americas. The ambitions of Nelson Rockefeller and Mayor La Guardia in transforming the city meshed neatly with Henry Luce’s vision for his rapidly growing media empire. Outgrowing the extant Time & Life Building at 1 Rockefeller Plaza was a concern, but the businessman Luce had his eye on another type of expansion, the sort that comes with wanting to make a mark on the physical city with a new home for his empire.

BREAKING GROUND ON the western frontier: Henry Luce and Nelson Rockefeller glove up and get to work in front of a Hugh Ferriss pencil rendering of the new Time & Life Building. The drawing previews how 1271 will sit against the backdrop of Rockefeller Center.

DWARFED BY A massive model of the Time & Life Building, Laurance Rockefeller points out a plaza feature to Rockefeller Center president G. S. Eyssell (above).

AN AERIAL-VIEW DRAWING of the new Time & Life Building in the context of Rockefeller Center, looking southwest. Illustrated by W. David Shaw, the New York Times advertisement supplement, October 25, 1959 (right).

FOUNDATION WORK BEGINS on the massive pit, seen from above Sixth Avenue (far left). A steelworker signals “boom up” to the crane operator (top). Workers pour concrete over reinforcing bars (bottom).

On the eve of the groundbreaking and more than two years from the building’s opening, tenants had already lined up for 65 percent of the space. Half of it, 20 floors’ worth, would house Time Inc. and 2,000 employees of its magazines, including Time, Fortune, Life, and Sports Illustrated. In several important ways, the new 48-story, $70 million, 1.5-millionsquare-foot Rockefeller Center tower broke the mold. The Time & Life Building was the first in which the chief tenant held a large stake. As the property’s 45 percent owner, Time Inc. not only shared in its financial risks and rewards, it also had a strong voice in decisions about the tower’s look, layouts, and more. Henry Luce and his son and advisor Henry III (Hank) used that voice liberally as members of the design committee.

NELSON ROCKEFELLER (center in dark tie) and Time Inc. president Roy E. Larsen toss coins for luck into the foundation pit at the Time & Life Building worksite.