Despite the Great Depression that had engulfed the USA since the Wall Street Crash of 1929, despite the flailing economy, and despite unprecedented joblessness, John Davison Rockefeller’s ambitious urban development project remained on track. Construction went on across the country, but especially in New York. The metropolis was now haunted by skyscrapers, and Rockefeller’s giant would be the greatest of them all! There’s quite a story behind it, but first we must tell something of its developer.
Everyone has heard the name somewhere, or read it on some commemorative plaque. John Davison Rockefeller was a petroleum magnate who had made a fortune in California thanks to the oil and gas resources discovered in the city of the angels: Los Angeles. In the late 1920s, the wealthy magnate decided to erect a building complex in the Midtown neighbourhood of Manhattan, New York – his own backyard. Rockefeller lived on 54th street, and wanted to breathe new life into this new district in the heart of the city. Why not simply rebuild an entire city block? This would not be like the Riverside church, whose construction he had paid for, much less an oil field for extracting black gold, but a skyscraper named Rockefeller Plaza.
The complex was designed as a city within the city. For the first time in urban history, the goal was to build a huge set of buildings that would combine offices, stores and leisure facilities. They would be in the Art Deco style, which was in vogue at the time. Rockefeller Plaza is made up of several buildings linked by suspended walkways, evoking the hanging Gardens of Babylon. To make the project possible, 228 buildings were demolished on the site, and some 4,000 residents were relocated. It was a great upheaval, but the board had to be cleared before Rockefeller’s monster could rise. Nothing was too grandiose for the wealthy businessman, and over fourteen million cubic feet of limestone were brought from Indiana to brighten the buildings’ façades – the largest order the state’s quarries had ever received.
But how did one build such a skyscraper? Rockefeller hired over four thousand workers for the titanic construction site. In desperate times these workers were prepared to do anything to eke out a living, even risking their lives on the scaffolding and sky bridges. Most were Italians, as they provided the cheapest labour at the time. John Davison Rockefeller would not live to see the completion of the construction, which would last until 1939. Here at last was the New York giant, towering majestic over the lines of yellow cabs and Central Park below. At the cutting edge of modernity, it was finally ready, and New Yorkers were awestruck.
Today Rockefeller Plaza is the very image of New York, and home to the famous Christmas tree which each year brings joy to some eight million New Yorkers.
Alan Alfredo Geday
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