Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

Numbers: Dates of buildings vary by source—some authorities use the date when construction begins, some the date when it ends. When in doubt, I’ve gone with the dates provided by Norval White and Elliot Willensky in their indispensable AIA Guide to New York City. The height of buildings, in feet as well as in stories, is often the concoction of developers and their publicists, who like to count rooftop air vents, water tanks, radio antennae, and anything else that can stretch the “official” number. I’ve generally allowed them their fun, except where it’s material, as in the case of the sixty-six- (or maybe sixty-seven-, but not remotely seventy-) story RCA Building. Same with quantity of buildings: Rockefeller Center management has always counted the six-story eastern appendages of the International Building as separate structures, but the whole thing is clearly one building, and I count it as such.

People: The only nomenclatural issue here has to do with the family at the book’s heart, the Rockefellers. The three men bearing the name John Davison Rockefeller are here referred to in two instances by the names by which they are known to the family archivists—Senior and Junior. The third, depending on context, is either Johnny or John.

Some readers may think a more material issue concerning people has to do with gender: save for a very few lesser characters, this saga has an all-male cast. This is a reflection of the era, and not of any authorial bias.

Finally, a comment on memory: Interviews are great for color and for a sense of personality. But even those conducted much closer to the events described here—those compiled by the Columbia University Oral History Project, for instance, or by the excellent architectural historian Carol Herselle Krinsky—are flawed by that most unreliable of research tools, memory. Contemporary documents, however, are precise. When I’ve encountered a conflict of facts, either I point it out in context or go with the one that seems to me, after six years’ immersion in this project, to be accurate. In a jump ball, the document almost always wins.
—D. O.
New York, March 2003

PROLOGUE

MAY 21, 1928

All the men entering the gleaming marble hall of the Metropolitan Club had arrived at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street on the wings of their wealth. The guest list was a roll call of New York’s richest: corporate titans Marshall Field, Clarence Mackay, and Walter P. Chrysler; Wall Street operators Jules S. Bache, Bernard Baruch, and Thomas Lamont; various Lehmans and Whitneys, Guggenheims and Warburgs, men whose very surnames provided all the definition they needed. Financier Otto Kahn was there, for Otto Kahn was ubiquitous in New York if opera was on the agenda, as it was on this balmy night. But an interest in Verdi or Wagner was not the primary qualifier for inclusion on the invitation list. According to a young architect named Robert O’Connor, whose father-in-law was scheduled to be the featured speaker, the evening’s host had simply invited everyone he knew who had more than ten million dollars.

Not all of them belonged to the Metropolitan Club, but there was no better venue for a convocation of the New York plutocracy. J. P. Morgan had founded the Metropolitan in 1891, after his friend John King, president of the Erie Railroad, was blackballed by the Union Club (Morgan said it was an act of spite; others insisted that certain members were offended by King’s dreadful table manners). Morgan’s stature had guaranteed a membership distinguished not solely by heredity or by financial success but by an unprecedented confluence of both. By 1928 the Metropolitan membership included two Vanderbilts, three Mellons, five Du Ponts, and six Roosevelts. It also included three men who were parties of interest to the evening’s proceedings. One was the host, an aristocrat named R. Fulton Cutting, known to some as “the first citizen of New York.” Another was Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University and a member of the Metropolitan’s board of governors, who knew that the future of his institution was to a large degree dependent on the evening’s outcome. The third was Ivy Ledbetter Lee, a preacher’s son from Georgia representing the man who, even in his absence, was the lead player in the evening’s drama.

No one expected John D. Rockefeller Jr. to attend the meeting at the Metropolitan Club that Monday night, and he didn’t disappoint. He wasn’t much of a clubman, generally preferring to spend his evenings at home in his nine-story mansion on West 54th Street; just the night before, he and his wife, Abby, had welcomed to a typical “family supper” another Ivy Lee client, Colonel Charles Lindbergh—“a simple, unostentatious, cleancut, charming fellow,” Rockefeller wrote. Rockefeller usually sought to insulate himself from the endless entreaties for access to the family treasury, and the Metropolitan Club event was clearly in that category. He got a lot of invitations of this kind, and almost always chose to deputize one of his associates to serve as a sort of scout.

Oddly, in this instance the scout—Lee—was collaborating with the supplicants. Odder still was the shadow play that was the evening’s presentation, offered ostensibly for the benefit of the assembled guests but mostly for the man who wasn’t there. The speaker was Benjamin Wistar Morris, an architect of middling accomplishment but excellent breeding. On this particular evening Morris was working for the board of the Metropolitan Opera Real Estate Company (R. Fulton Cutting, president), a group of men whose money was substantial, very old, and dearly husbanded. The elaborate clay model of an opera house and other buildings on the table in front of Morris; his impressive stereopticon slides; his reasoned, detailed, and admirably practical speech—how could anyone not be convinced of the enormous civic virtue that would arise from the development of a small plot of land in the center of a slummy midtown block?

Morris’s plan, Lee later reported to Rockefeller, would leave most of this land a plaza for the benefit of the public. “The Opera Company itself is able to finance the building of [a] new structure,” he added. Wasn’t it, Lee suggested, worth putting up the $2.5 million necessary to acquire this land from Columbia University, its improbable owner, so New York could finally have a new opera house?

SEPTEMBER 30, 1939
This time Rockefeller showed up. Seated in the front of a large gymnasium on the fourth floor of a new sixteen-story office building, he waited for his thirty-one-year-old son, Nelson, to finish the introductions. The audience this time consisted of some two thousand carpenters, charwomen, elevator operators, violinists, bookkeepers, rental agents, skating coaches, and widely assorted others on the Rockefeller payroll. One of those in attendance said that Nelson’s natural charm, amplified by his boundless energy, “gave the meeting something of a feeling of a college rally of students and faculty a night or two before the big game.”

His father would not sustain the pep rally; it wasn’t his way. He was a constitutionally shy man, and on those occasions when he was compelled to speak in public he was far more likely to adopt the mien of the Bible-school teacher he had long been than to attempt to become a cheerleader. Facing the crowd that had been lifted so high by his buoyant son, Rockefeller chose to give a history lesson. Eleven years earlier, he said, “I was asked to join with others in acquiring [a] plot to be given to the city for a street and public square, in order to provide an adequate setting for the opera house.” But, he continued, “the opera people withdrew entirely from the undertaking—an undertaking which they themselves had initiated and which I had become interested in solely at their instance.” As a result, he went on to explain, things didn’t turn out exactly as he had thought they would.

CHAPTER ONE

The Heart of This Great City Is Now Settled for All Time. It is the district from 34th to 59th Sts., 3rd to 10th Avenues.
—real estate record and builders’ guide, 1920

In an era when nearly every college president bore a triple- barreled name, none carried as potent a charge as Nicholas Murray Butler. To his intimates the president of Columbia University was “Murray”; to the associates who saw him found the school’s Teachers College in 1887 at the age of twenty- five he was “Nicholas Miraculous.” His employees simply called him President (when they didn’t refer to him as “Czar Nicholas”), his acquaintances, Doctor. The editors of Life named him “one of the most erudite men of his time.” None of this necessarily contradicted Senator Robert M. La Follette, who said Butler was a “bootlicker of men of fortune.” Theodore Roosevelt was even blunter: he considered him “an aggressive and violent ass.”

It was inevitable that a man so comfortable within the embrace of the American patriciate would provoke such epithets. He had built a career, a reputation, and an unblemished belief in his own virtue upon a nearly holy devotion to the marriage of money and power. Wherever Butler traveled, his focus italicized by the vivid smear of his luxuriant eyebrows, he looked benevolently upon the deeds, and the needs, of America’s last ruling class. Rising from a middle-class New Jersey upbringing, he had become a pillar of the Republican Party (and a plausible candidate for its presidential nomination in 1920), a ubiquitous presence on the circuits of international power (he was Gladstone’s houseguest as a young man, dined with Kaiser Wilhelm in his early forties, met with Mussolini when Italian fascism was still new), a joiner and a leader so prolific in his associations and so enamored of his own renown that, year after year, he made certain that his was the longest entry in Who’s Who. This annual exercise in self- celebration cataloged honorary doctorates (writer Alva Johnston, who thought well of him, called Butler “a harvesting machine of university degrees”); club memberships (in New York alone, he belonged to the Century, the Union, the University, the Lotos, and the Metropolitan); publications (mostly repurposed speeches, few of them substantive, none of them memorable); and a sufficiency of other details that each year consumed more than a column and a half of tiny type, a mutable monument to his floodlit success.

Whatever it was he was seeking, the man worked at it. He produced all those speeches without the aid of ghostwriters, and his workday was frighteningly efficient. Letters poured from the President’s House on Morningside Heights or from his office in Low Library in a volume that would overwhelm the hardiest archivist. He dictated each morning until noon, pacing back and forth, his coattails flying behind him, his secretaries desperately trying to keep up. Even the most trivial letters were answered within a day of their receipt at 60 Morningside Drive— or at his summer place in Southampton, on Long Island, or at the hotels in which he lived on his annual visits to Europe. In London he always stayed at the Berkeley, where he would receive wires from the States addressed in care of the hotel’s comically inappropriate cable address: sybarite, london.

Butler’s European trips were largely the product of his long- held presidency of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a platform from which he helped negotiate the Kellogg- Briand Pact of 1928. This was a document that renounced war, a deeply Butlerian notion insofar as the nobility of its sentiment balanced precisely with its specious futility. Still, it was an accomplishment that earned him the Nobel Peace Prize three years later, which was a nice thing but probably not nearly as gratifying to Butler as the honor that would endure for forty- three years of his long life. The presidency of Columbia University had brought Butler everything he had—the club memberships, the patronage of the Republican hierarchy, the offer of railroad presidencies extended by E. H. Harriman and J. P. Morgan. But it had also brought him a problem that by his own admission had vexed the university’s board of trustees (and, therefore, Butler himself) since the day he had been installed as Columbia’s president in 1902: what to do with the eleven acres of midtown Manhattan that Columbia owned—land that produced so very little, and that if properly exploited could be worth so very, very much.

Butler was not the first Columbia president to salivate over the potential revenue from the land, originally almost four full blocks stretching from 47th to 51st Street, from Fifth Avenue nearly all the way to Sixth. For decades the land had looked to Columbia’s officers and trustees much like a lamb chop must look to a wolf. But long before the institutional drooling had begun, the property was more nuisance than asset, acquired almost as a sort of booby prize in a state distribution of public lands.

Originally part of the Dutch-controlled Common Lands assembled by Peter Minuit in 1624, the acreage that Butler would eventually turn into Columbia’s dowry became, by the end of the seventeenth century, property of the City of New York. But the city, such as it was, still lay huddled around the southern tip of Manhattan, and this twenty-acre chunk of hilly slopes and rocky promontories might as well have been in Poughkeepsie.

To David Hosack, though, it was a convenient and comfortable ride up the carriage road that ran along the spine of Manhattan Island. Hosack was a man of parts, most of them glittering: physician, scholar, gentleman botanist, salonnier, friend to both Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. Through a provident marriage and his own native talents, he had by 1800 become one of the foremost citizens of the growing city. His portrait was painted by Rembrandt Peale; Tocqueville wrote of the pleasures of Hosack’s table. He was also a professor at the College of Physicians and Surgeons—precursor of Columbia’s medical school— and longed for a piece of land that he could turn into a garden of materia medica, a sort o...