24 Facts About Rockefeller Plaza

Rockefeller Plaza Center is a large complex consisting of 19 commercial buildings covering 22 acres between 48th Street and 51st Street in Midtown Manhattan, New York City.

Originally envisioned as the site for a new Metropolitan Opera building, the current Rockefeller Plaza Center came about after the Met could not afford to move to the proposed new building.

Construction of Rockefeller Plaza Center started in 1931, and the first buildings opened in 1933.

Radio City, along Sixth Avenue and centered on 30 Rockefeller Plaza, includes Radio City Music Hall and was built for RCA's radio-related enterprises such as NBC.

Rockefeller Plaza hired Todd, Robertson and Todd as design consultants to determine its viability.

Related searches

The final small building would have been rented by Germany, but Rockefeller Plaza ruled this out in 1934 after noticing National Socialist extremism from the country's government.

The Rockefeller Plaza family started occupying the 56th floor of the RCA Building, though the offices would later expand to the 54th and 55th floors as well.

Rockefeller Plaza Center was popular among visitors: for instance, the lines to enter one of the Music Hall's five daily shows stretched from Sixth Avenue and 50th Street to Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street, a distance of four blocks.

Rockefeller Plaza Center unveiled plans for expansion to the southwest and north in 1944.

Time Inc and Rockefeller Plaza Center formed a joint venture, Rock-Time Inc, which would share the tower's rent income between Time Inc and Rockefeller Plaza Center.

New York Times report in 1982 stated that Rockefeller Plaza Center had been popular among tenants from its inception, being almost fully rented for much of the first half-century of its existence.

However, Rockefeller Plaza Center was not popular as an entertainment complex, having been used for mainly commercial purposes through its history.

Rockefeller Plaza Group filed for bankruptcy protection in May 1995 after missing several mortgage payments.

The Rockefeller Plaza family moved out of their offices in the GE Building in 2014 due to rising rents.

At the front of 30 Rock is the Lower Rockefeller Plaza, located in the very center of the complex and below ground level.

Rockefeller Plaza's beliefs include "the supreme worth of the individual and in his right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" and "truth and justice are fundamental to an enduring social order" .

Rockefeller Plaza is a pedestrian street running through the complex, parallel to Fifth and Sixth avenues.

Since Rockefeller Plaza is technically a purely private property to which the public is welcome, the plaza is closed for part of one day every year.

Consequently, Rockefeller Plaza Center did not purchase Maxwell's property until 1970.

Art that currently exists within Rockefeller Plaza Center was inspired by Professor Alexander's arts program.

Isamu Noguchi's gleaming stainless steel bas-relief, News, over the main entrance to 50 Rockefeller Plaza was, at the time of commissioning, the largest metal bas-relief in the world.

Rockefeller Plaza called the plan for Rockefeller Center "an apotheosis of megalomania, a defiant egotism" arising from an ostentatious display of wealth, and said that "the sooner we accomplish the destiny it so perfectly foreshadows, the sooner we shall be able to clear the ground and begin again".

Urban planner Le Corbusier had a more optimistic view of the complex, expressing that Rockefeller Plaza Center was "rational, logically conceived, biologically normal, [and] harmonious".

The writer Frederick Lewis Allen took a more moderate viewpoint, saying that negative critics had "hoped for too much" precisely because Rockefeller Plaza Center had been planned during an economically prosperous time, but was constructed during the Depression.