Rockefeller Center was meant to be a new home for the Metropolitan Opera
Midtown's Art Deco showpiece began as a scheme to give the Metropolitan Opera a new house. The 1929 crash killed that plan, so John D. Rockefeller Jr. pivoted to radio, luring RCA and NBC, and built one of the Great Depression's grandest projects on land leased from Columbia University.
The site between 48th and 51st streets has an unexpected past. In 1801 the physician David Hosack bought twenty rural acres there and opened the Elgin Botanic Garden, the first public botanical garden in the country. By 1823 Columbia University owned the land, keeping it as an investment after moving its campus uptown, and it remained the landlord until 1985. In 1928 the university granted Rockefeller an 87-year lease costing $3 million annually.
The Met had been hunting for a replacement opera house since 1926, but it could not pay for the building alone, and after the stock market crash it cancelled its plans in December 1929. Rockefeller turned instead to RCA and its subsidiaries NBC and RKO, who agreed by May 1930 to anchor a media and entertainment complex. Three architecture firms worked jointly as the Associated Architects, led by the Art Deco enthusiast Raymond Hood, so that no single building carried a firm's name. Rockefeller at first resisted putting his family name on a commercial venture; his publicist Ivy Lee convinced him it would draw tenants, and the name changed in December 1931.
Clearing the ground meant knocking down 228 buildings and displacing about 4,000 tenants, although a few holdouts refused to leave and the complex was built around them. The order for Indiana limestone was the largest of its kind at the time. The RCA Building opened late because of a row over Man at the Crossroads, a lobby mural that was covered and then removed. The first Christmas tree went up in December 1933, and a sunken ice rink replaced struggling shops in 1936. Rockefeller also refused to rent a planned building to Germany in 1934, wary of the Nazi government.
Time Inc. and Associated Press later moved in, adding print journalism to broadcasting. Eleven buildings were finished by 1937 at a cost above $100 million, and Rockefeller drove a ceremonial last rivet on November 1, 1939. Today the complex counts 19 commercial buildings over 22 acres and became a city landmark in 1985.
Source: Rockefeller Center
