New York Opportunity and Income New York Career Guidance Babel's Secret New York Work and Welfare Minorities Higher Education This Was New York: The Nation's Capital in 1789 Points of Interest Centers Broadway and the Road Midtown The Metropolitian Museum of Art The New York Botanical Garden Central Park Brooklyn Points of Interest New York Aquarium The City's Libraries History The Founding The American City The City of Five Boroughs Immigration	New York : Centers Strictly speaking, Rockefeller Center is not a center at all. People use the word in two closely related meanings, of which Rockefeller Center meets neither. With capital letters we have Medical Centers and Civic Centers, and some years ago we tried hard to get a Music Center but did not succeed. This kind of center means a large group of buildings -- sometimes it may be one huge building as in the case of one of our Medical Centers -under one administration and dedicated to a single line of business. It may be the business of taking care of sick people or the business of governing a city, or the business of providing New York with musical recreation and education, if we had got our Music Center. Frequently the Center is our old friend the District. We have the Garment Center which means the district in which the garment industry is concentrated, as we had or still have the financial district, the leather and dry goods district, old Newspaper Row which was the newspaper district, and the insurance district, all of them downtown. In midtown there is the shopping district and the publishing district and the theater district and the night club district. Here are independent enterprises engaged in the same line of business. Sometimes we follow old usage and speak of the shopping district and the dry goods district. Sometimes we fall into the new usage and speak of the shopping center and the financial center. But the idea of a common pursuit is always there. Rockefeller Center is not a functional center or district. It is simply a great group of buildings erected in central or midtown New York by the Rockefeller fortune. Its chief purpose is to be a center of public interest, to be sure; but in order to be that it must not concentrate on any one particular interest. As against the Medical Center with a capital letter, or the garment center which comes sometimes with capital letters and sometimes without, Rockefeller Center has no specialty. Its aim is to be a microcosm, a miniature of America, containing a little of everything. Originally people thought that it would be a true occupational center, and expressed their belief by calling it Radio City, which was almost calling it Radio Center. It seemed reasonable to assume that as this giant building enterprise in the heart of Manhattan was coming to birth at the same time that radio was emerging from infancy into lusty childhood the two were bound to merge. But the thing did not come to pass, at least not to the degree expected. Rockefeller Center has radio, with the National Broadcasting Company's studios, but there are big broadcasting enterprises outside of Rockefeller Center. Short of monopoly Rockefeller Center has everything. It has radio. It has newspapers in the form of Associated Press headquarters. It has book publishers and some very considerable magazine interests. It has two great theaters, an impressive group of restaurants, a distinguished night club, a skating rink, retail shops. It has flower gardens, both on the surface of the earth where flowers are most often found and also gardens up in the air of more than one sort. It has penguins and seals in season. It is true that among Rockefeller Center's monumental buildings the two largest have radio in their names, the RCA Building and the RKO Building, but the floor space in them is not monopolized by radio. The tenants are miscellaneous. Some of them are the Rockefeller interests themselves, business and philanthropic. In both fields the Rockefeller interests are far-flung interests, over the whole country and the whole world, and Rockefeller Center may in this sense be regarded as the most central of all our centers in New York. Its filaments reach out farthest. We may put it another way. Rockefeller Center is an epitome of the energies of a nation for the reason that the money that built it was Standard Oil money. There we strike plenty of national history. American visitors -- and for that matter foreign visitors, too -- may well take a personal interest in Rockefeller Center. Its towers and terraces and plazas were built with the profits from the oil lamps, the sewing machine lubricants, the auto gasoline and oil of three or four generations of America -- and all America. For a Standard Oil generation is not like a literary generation or even a political generation. When you say oil lamps, sewing machines and automobiles, you embrace a nation. Standard Oil covered the world, and Rockefeller philanthropies followed in its wake. The war wrote in large letters on the Rockefeller walls. The Center has a great International Building. Nestling at its feet, along Fifth Avenue, is a whole flock of beautiful daughter-buildings in the foreign pre-skyscraper style. They became most of them daughters in mourning; at least they gave the visitor no pleasure. The French Building was tragedy. People took so little pleasure in the Italian Building's proud slogan, "Ever onward, eternal youth," that the great panel had to be boarded up. We took little pleasure in the goal toward which Mussolini had been driving his Italian youth ever onward. A gesture of proud defiance, but not devoid of melancholy, was the dedication of Holland House, latest in the international group at Rockefeller Center, when the Netherlands were already under the Nazi heel. It was the irony of our 1939-40 New York World's Fair that we seemed to be engaged in dedicating national pavilions only for Hitler to put into mourning -- Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, Holland -- and ultimately France. But men and nations have come back from exile to write new records and do great works. Home