Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center - Hardcover

Okrent, Daniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670031690 ISBN 13: 9780670031696

Publisher: Viking Adult, 2003

Synopsis

A social history of the creation of Rockefeller Center notes how its ambitious planning process was compromised by the depression; identifies the roles of such individuals as Gertrude Vanderbilt, Georgia O'Keefe, and Benito Mussolini; and cites the eccentric personalities that oversaw its construction. 50,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Daniel Okrent is a prizewinning journalist, a frequent television commentator, and the author of several highly acclaimed books. For many years, he was a senior editorial executive at Time Inc. and a contributor to all of the company's major magazines.

Reviews

Just as Okrent's Nine Innings beautifully telescoped all of baseball into a single game in 1982 between the Milwaukee Brewers and the Baltimore Orioles, so the former Life editor and Time Inc. executive finds in the creation of Rockefeller Center a good deal of New York and many of the contradictions in American life as the country worked to emerge from the Depression. Built for profit on a run-down stretch of midtown between Fifth and Sixth Avenues called the Upper Estate-myriad lots that underwriter John D. Rockefeller Jr. slowly and inexorably leveraged into an available whole-the seven-year project was second only to the WPA in temporary job creation, though as Okrent shows, the project was far from worker-centered. While one of its originally intended (and abandoned) roles was to provide a new home for the Metropolitan Opera, the sprawling complex came to house a hydra-headed media center anchored by NBC, RKO and RCA, yet saw its gorgeous Center Theatre torn down in 1954 (though Radio City Music Hall and the Rainbow Room remain). But the real stories here come from individual contributions to the huge project, from Junior (and his six children) to hired-artist Georgia O'Keeffe and her apparently abusive photographer-gallerist husband, Alfred Stieglitz; the Roxyettes and the Glee Club singers; engineer O.B. Hanson (inventor of "studio audiences"); and Ray Hood (who ascends from radiator-cover designer to architect of the "Radiator Building"). That the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree tradition began during construction in 1931 as a "modest balsam" decorated by site workers with cranberries, "garlands of paper and... a few tin cans" is just one of thousands of details (including the famous commissioning and destruction of Diego Rivera's murals) that make this magisterial account, itself seven years in the making, fascinating and immediate.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Rockefeller Center, a complex of buildings in Manhattan built over an eight- to ten-year period the during Great Depression, was the result of a philanthropic gesture by John D. Rockefeller Jr. that took on a life of its own. It took a coterie of legal firms, bankers, architects, and real estate moguls, not to mention thousands of laborers, to create the most ambitious construction project since the pyramids. The scale was unprecedented for its time: 154,000 tons of structural steel; 1,000,000 square feet of window glass; 200 miles of brass pipe; and so on, with 42 elevators in five separate banks necessary to carry its occupants on their appointed rounds. With more office space than the much taller Empire State Building, this architectural marvel was produced to make optimal use of light and air flow before the advent of fluorescent lighting and air-conditioning. The individual characters and their stories form the backbone of this feat, including the famous episode of the controversial Diego Rivera wall mural that was never seen by the public. David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670031690
• ISBN 13: 9780670031696
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 544