Construction of Rockefeller Center
The construction of the Rockefeller Center complex in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, United States, was conceived in the late 1920s and led by John D. Rockefeller Jr. Rockefeller Center is on one of Columbia University's former campuses and is bounded by Fifth Avenue to the east, Sixth Avenue to the west, 48th Street to the south, and 51st Street to the north. The center occupies in total, with some of office space.
Columbia University had acquired the site in the early 19th century but had moved to Morningside Heights in Upper Manhattan in the early 1900s. By the 1920s, Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan was a prime site for development. Around that time, the Metropolitan Opera was looking for a new site for their opera house, and architect Benjamin Wistar Morris decided on the former Columbia site.
Rockefeller eventually became involved in the project and leased the Columbia site in 1928 for 87 years. The lease excluded land along the east side of Sixth Avenue to the west of the Rockefeller property, as well as at the site's southeast corner. He hired Todd, Robertson, and Todd as design consultants and selected the architectural firms of Corbett, Harrison & MacMurray, Hood, Godley & Fouilhoux, and Reinhard & Hofmeister for the opera complex. However, the Met was unsure about moving there, and the Wall Street crash of 1929 put an end to the plans. Rockefeller instead entered into negotiations with the Radio Corporation of America to create a mass-media complex on the site. A new plan was released in January 1930, and an update to the plan was presented after Rockefeller obtained a lease for the land along Sixth Avenue. Revisions continued until March 1931, when the current site design was unveiled. A late change to the proposal included a complex of internationally themed structures along Fifth Avenue.
All structures in the original complex were designed in the Art Deco architectural style. Excavation of the site started in April 1931, and construction began that September on the first buildings. The first edifice was opened in September 1932, and most of the complex was completed by 1935. The final three buildings were built between 1936 and 1940, although Rockefeller Center was officially completed by November 2, 1939. The construction project employed more than 40,000 people and was considered the largest private construction project at the time. It had cost the equivalent of $ billion in dollars to construct. Since then, there have been several modifications to the complex. An additional building at 75 Rockefeller Plaza was constructed in 1947, while another at 600 Fifth Avenue was constructed in 1952. Four towers were built along the west side of Sixth Avenue in the 1960s and 1970s, which was the most recent expansion of Rockefeller Center. The Center Theatre from the original complex was demolished in 1954.
Site
In 1686, much of Manhattan, including the future Rockefeller Center site, was established as a "common land" of the city of New York. The land remained in city ownership until 1801, when the physician David Hosack, a member of the New York elite, purchased a parcel of land in what is now Midtown for $5,000, equivalent to $ in dollars. In terms of the present-day street grid, Hosack's land was bounded by 47th Street on the south, 51st Street on the north, and Fifth Avenue on the east, while the western boundary was slightly east of Sixth Avenue. At the time, the land was sparsely occupied and consisted mostly of forest. Hosack opened the Elgin Botanic Garden, the country's first public botanical garden, on the site in 1804. The garden would operate until 1811, when Hosack put the land on sale for $100,000. As no one was willing to buy the land, the New York State Legislature eventually bought the land for $75,000.In 1814, the trustees of Columbia University were looking to the state legislature for funds when the legislature unexpectedly gave Hosack's former land to the college instead. The gardens became part of Columbia's "Upper Estate", on the condition that the college move its entire campus to the Upper Estate by 1827. Although the relocation requirement was repealed in 1819, Columbia's trustees did not see the land as "an attractive or helpful gift", so the college let the gardens deteriorate. The area would not become developed until the 1830s, and the land's value did not increase to any meaningful amount until the late 1850s, when St. Patrick's Cathedral was built nearby, spurring a wave of development in the area. Ironically, the cathedral was built in that location because it faced the Upper Estate gardens. By 1860, the Upper Estate contained four row houses below 49th Street as well as a wooden building across from the cathedral. The surrounding area was underdeveloped, with a potter's field and the railroad lines from Grand Central Depot to the east.
Columbia built a new campus near its Upper Estate in 1856, selling a plot at Fifth Avenue and 48th Street to the St. Nicholas Church to pay for construction. Shortly afterward, Columbia implemented height restrictions that prevented any taller buildings, such as apartment blocks or commercial and industrial buildings, from being built on its property. Narrow brownstone houses and expensive "Vanderbilt Colony" mansions were built on nearby streets, and the area became synonymous with wealth. By 1879, there were brownstones on every one of the 203 plots in the Upper Estate, which were all owned by Columbia.
The construction of the Sixth Avenue elevated line in the 1870s made it easy to access commercial and industrial areas elsewhere in Manhattan. However, the line also drastically reduced property values because the elevated structure obstructed views from adjacent properties, and because the trains on the structure caused noise pollution. Columbia sold the southernmost block of its Midtown property in 1904, using the $3 million from the sale to pay for newly acquired land in Morningside Heights even further uptown, to replace its Lower Estate. Simultaneously, the low-lying houses along Fifth Avenue were being replaced with taller commercial developments, and the widening of the avenue between 1909 and 1914 contributed to this transition. Columbia also stopped enforcing its height restriction, which Okrent describes as a tactical mistake for the college because the wave of development along Fifth Avenue caused the Upper Estate to become available for such redevelopment. Since the leases on the Upper Estate row houses were being allowed to expire without renewal, the university's real estate adviser John Tonnele was tasked with finding suitable tenants, who could net the university more profit than what the row houses' occupants were currently paying.
Early plans
New Metropolitan Opera House
In 1926, the Metropolitan Opera started looking for locations to build a new opera house to replace its existing building at 39th Street and Broadway. This was not a new effort, as Otto Kahn, the Met's president, had been seeking to erect a new opera house since he assumed the position in 1908. However, the Met did not itself have money to fund the new facility, and Kahn's efforts to solicit funding from R. Fulton Cutting, the wealthy and influential Cooper Union president, were unsuccessful. Cutting did support the 1926 proposal for a new building, as did William Kissam Vanderbilt. By mid-1927, Kahn had hired architect Benjamin Wistar Morris and designer Joseph Urban to come up with designs for the opera house. They created three designs, all of which the Met rejected.Kahn wanted the opera house to be on a relatively cheap piece of land near a busy theater and retail area, with access to transportation. In January 1928, Tonnele approached Cutting to propose the Upper Estate as a possible location for the Met. Cutting told of Tonnele's idea to Morris, who thought that the Columbia grounds in Midtown were ideal for the new opera house. By early 1928, Morris had created blueprints for an opera house and a surrounding retail complex at the Upper Estate. However, the new building was too expensive for the Met to fund by itself, and it needed an endowment. On May 21, 1928, Morris presented the project during a dinner for potential investors, at which the Rockefeller family's public relations adviser Ivy Lee was a guest. Lee later informed his boss, John D. Rockefeller Jr., about the proposal, in which the latter showed interest. Rockefeller wished to give the site serious consideration before he invested, and he did not want to fund the entire project on his own. As a result, in August 1928, Rockefeller contacted several firms for advice. Rockefeller ended up hiring the Todd, Robertson and Todd Engineering Corporation as design consultants to determine the project's viability, with one of the firm's partners, John R. Todd, to serve as the principal builder and managing agent for the project. Todd submitted a plan for the opera house site in September 1928, in which he proposed constructing office buildings, department stores, apartment buildings, and hotels around the new opera house.
In June 1928, Charles O. Heydt, one of Rockefeller's business associates, met with Kahn to discuss the proposed opera house. After the meeting, Heydt purchased land just north of the proposed opera house site as per Rockefeller's request, but for a different reason: Rockefeller was afraid that many of the landmarks of his childhood, in the area, were going to be demolished by the 1920s wave of development. The writer Daniel Okrent states that Rockefeller's acquisition of the land might have been more for the family name rather than for the Met proposal itself, as Rockefeller never mentioned the details of the proposal in his daily communications with his father, John D. Rockefeller Sr.
In mid-1928, the Met and Rockefeller were named as prospective buyers for the Columbia site. A lease was agreed to in late 1928 and signed on December 31 of that year. Columbia leased the parcel to Rockefeller for 87 years at a cost of over $3 million per year, thereby allowing all the existing leases on the site to expire by November 1931 so Rockefeller could purchase them. Rockefeller would pay $3.6 million per year. In return, he would be entitled to the income from the property, which at the time was about $300,000 annually. This consisted of a 27-year lease for the site from Columbia, with the option for three 21-year renewals, such that the lease could theoretically last until 2015. Moreover, Rockefeller could avoid any rent increases for forty-five years, adjusted for inflation. The lease did not include the strip of land bordering Sixth Avenue on the west side of the parcel, as well as St. Nicholas Church's property on Fifth Avenue between 48th and 49th Streets, and so these were excluded from the plans. Simultaneous with the signing of the lease, the Metropolitan Square Corporation was created to oversee construction.