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Everyone who has ever visited Rockefeller Center in the heart of Manhattan --- that probably includes a majority of the American people --- has perhaps wondered: How did all this happen? Who dreamed up this incredible place? Why here?
Daniel Okrent, who has spent much of his working life at Rockefeller Center (with Time and Life magazines) has set out to answer these questions in GREAT FORTUNE, starting with the days when Manhattan Island was owned by the Dutch and bringing things pretty much up to the present. It is a fascinating tale, told here with literary flair, thorough research and broad historical perspective.
The best-known component of Rockefeller Center, of course, is the famous Music Hall with its enormous stage, elevator-equipped orchestra pit and Rockettes chorus line. That theater is duly celebrated in the book, but Okrent's focus is much wider, encompassing the complex land deals that brought the site under the wing of the Rockefeller family, the cast of wildly disparate characters and clashing temperaments who built and guided it, and the tangled web of Big Business and High Society interests that made the place what it is today --- a world center for communications, business, trade and political wheeling-dealing as well as for mass-market entertainment and tourism.
The cast of characters is large. The expected famous names are all present --- John D. Rockefeller Jr. and the whole Rockefeller clan; S. L. "Roxy" Rothapfel, showman extraordinaire; Nicholas Murray Butler, dour president of Columbia University; and Otto Kahn, early patron and financier of the Metropolitan Opera.
But what gives Okrent's book a special flavor are the many other major players in this drama that most of us have never heard of. Two names stand out: John R. Todd, the crusty boss of the entire construction operation and the finished Center itself, and Raymond Hood, a hard-drinking architectural genius whom Okrent credits as the Center's principal designer. There are cameo appearances by all sorts of celebrities --- Arturo Toscanini, Diego Rivera, and even Benito Mussolini, who gave his blessing to a building on the site that housed Italian business interests.
Okrent is both a clever phrasemaker and a shrewd judge of character. In his narrative John D. Rockefeller Jr. begins as a timid and diffident patron, almost afraid to take control of the huge enterprise that had been unexpectedly dumped into his lap, only rising late in the game to a level of confidence that made his hand on the helm a sure one. His son Nelson comes off as a hard-driving schemer whose zeal to get things done left twisted bodies in his wake, some of them his own brothers.
The idea that became Rockefeller Center began in the 1920s as a scheme to find a new home for the Metropolitan Opera. There was, alas, factional feuding between the opera-minded people around Otto Kahn and the board that controlled the company's real estate. After the opera group backed out, famed publicist Ivy Lee was the man who brought Rockefeller into the picture. Okrent reports that Rockefeller spent about $60 million of his own money plus another $44.6 million obtained through the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company via a mortgage loan. In 2003 terms, those figures amount to $805 million and $599 million. "Boggles the mind," as Center tenant Time magazine used to put it.
In addition to such nuts-and-bolts reporting, Okrent's book is crammed with illuminating anecdotal detail that gives it a wonderfully rich texture. He unearths, for instance, this quote from a Depression-weary society dowager about the Metropolitan Opera: "Now that we don't dare to display our jewelry in public, why should we continue to support these wops?"
Rockefeller Center today is a totally different entity from the one envisioned by its founders. It had from the start --- and continues to have --- plenty of detractors (social critic Lewis Mumford led a chorus of catcalls for years). Okrent was not auditioning for cheerleader when he wrote this book; he has, however, made himself Rockefeller Center's premiere historian.
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn (Robertfinn@aol.com)
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