Rockefeller Center: Art Deco City Within the City

Few places represent the ambition and optimism of the Art Deco era more completely than Rockefeller Center in New York City. Rising in the heart of Manhattan during the darkest years of the Great Depression, the project transformed a deteriorated section of Midtown into an extraordinary complex of skyscrapers, theaters, shops, gardens, promenades and public plazas. The original plan had been centered around a new home for the Metropolitan Opera, but when those plans collapsed, John D. Rockefeller Jr. made the remarkable decision to proceed with an enormous privately financed commercial development. The revised architectural scheme was submitted in 1930, just as the country was entering an economic crisis that would make the scale of the undertaking even more extraordinary.

What emerged was much more than another group of New York skyscrapers. Rockefeller Center became something close to a city within a city, planned around pedestrian spaces and unified by architecture, sculpture, murals, fountains and landscaping. Its streamlined limestone towers and setbacks provided the architectural framework, but art was incorporated almost everywhere: carved directly into buildings, placed above entrances, painted across monumental walls and installed as sculpture within the plazas. The result was one of the most ambitious collaborations between architecture and the decorative arts created in twentieth century America. That achievement was ultimately recognized when Rockefeller Center was designated a New York City Landmark in 1985 and a National Historic Landmark on December 23, 1987.

And one of the most human traditions began before the buildings were even finished. In December 1931, construction workers pooled their money and placed a modest 20 foot balsam fir on the construction site, decorating it with homemade garlands. In the middle of the Depression it became a small symbol of hope. Rockefeller Center formally established the Christmas tree as an annual tradition in 1933, eventually creating one of the most recognizable holiday images in the world: a towering illuminated tree overlooking the sunken plaza, skating rink and Paul Manship’s golden Prometheus