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Narrated by Christopher Grove
Daniel OkrentUnabridged — 22 hours, 14 minutes
Narrated by Christopher Grove
Daniel OkrentUnabridged — 22 hours, 14 minutes
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Great Fortune explains in a carefully researched, deft mosaic of anecdotes and personality sketches how Junior and his associates managed to build a city within a city, disdained by critics early on but eventually revered by them and the public at large. It was the first multipurpose urban center and, compared with those that came later, including Lincoln Center and the World Trade Center, by far the most harmonious. — Grace Lichtenstein
How Rockefeller Center came to be, and its dramatic ascent in the popular imagination, are the subject of Great Fortune, an absorbing, brightly written history by Daniel Okrent, who was a longtime top editor at Time Inc. Okrent delves into the history and pulls out an array of intriguing men, most of them little known, who have greater bragging rights to Rockefeller Center than the man whose name it bears. — Adam Cohen
Just as Okrent's Nine Innings beautifully telescoped all of baseball into a single game in 1982 between the Milwaukee Brewers and the Baltimore Orioles, so the former Life editor and Time Inc. executive finds in the creation of Rockefeller Center a good deal of New York and many of the contradictions in American life as the country worked to emerge from the Depression. Built for profit on a run-down stretch of midtown between Fifth and Sixth Avenues called the Upper Estate-myriad lots that underwriter John D. Rockefeller Jr. slowly and inexorably leveraged into an available whole-the seven-year project was second only to the WPA in temporary job creation, though as Okrent shows, the project was far from worker-centered. While one of its originally intended (and abandoned) roles was to provide a new home for the Metropolitan Opera, the sprawling complex came to house a hydra-headed media center anchored by NBC, RKO and RCA, yet saw its gorgeous Center Theatre torn down in 1954 (though Radio City Music Hall and the Rainbow Room remain). But the real stories here come from individual contributions to the huge project, from Junior (and his six children) to hired-artist Georgia O'Keeffe and her apparently abusive photographer-gallerist husband, Alfred Stieglitz; the Roxyettes and the Glee Club singers; engineer O.B. Hanson (inventor of "studio audiences"); and Ray Hood (who ascends from radiator-cover designer to architect of the "Radiator Building"). That the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree tradition began during construction in 1931 as a "modest balsam" decorated by site workers with cranberries, "garlands of paper and... a few tin cans" is just one of thousands of details (including the famous commissioning and destruction of Diego Rivera's murals) that make this magisterial account, itself seven years in the making, fascinating and immediate. (Oct.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Okrent, former editor at large at Time, Inc., eloquently conveys the evolution of 11 acres of midtown real estate owned by Columbia University into a major business venture for John D. Rockefeller Jr. during the Great Depression. Rockefeller Center ultimately became a world-renowned cultural centerpiece for New York City, but the story of its rise is also a national saga involving the pioneering period in American broadcasting. This carefully researched book covers the strategies to acquire the lot leases, insights into the Rockefeller family, and vivid portraits of leading players such as architect Raymond Hood (of whom one observer said, "Anyone who could eat so much must be a genius"), as well as a supporting cast like Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Among the intriguing details revealded by Okrent is that in 1930, the project's executive manager, John R. Todd (grandfather of Christine Todd Whitman), suggested that Rockefeller purchase the land outright. He declined. It was not until 1985 that his heirs purchased the land from Columbia. This excellent, well-crafted book is dense with fascinating characters and history. It is almost in the same category as Robert Caro's The Power Broker for explaining how New York came to be the way it is. Recommended for all public libraries.-Elaine Machleder, Bronx, NY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
A suitably grand, and suitably complex, history of the skyscraper that remains a symbol of all that is wondrous about New York City. It being New York, there was nothing straightforward about the planning, design, or construction of what was once called Radio City. As former Time executive Daniel Okrent writes, the project began as an opera house, shifted locations and key backers and eventually purposes, and fell into the hands of the illustrious and magnificently moneyed Rockefeller family, some of whose members had, in the 1920s, lately shifted their public stance from avaricious acquirers of fortune to servants of the public good. After tough negotiations with the president and trustees of Columbia University (who would realize a fortune from their lease of the immensely valuable real estate, if decades later), the Rockefellers and their architects broadened their notion of the project to make it even grander; it would become, Okrent writes, not a destination in the city but, "organically, the city itself—a city where the privately maintained sidewalks were spotless, where the ramp-relieved cross streets were free of delivery trucks" and other impediments. Yet, for all the deep pockets of the builders, the construction fell on every imaginable difficulty, from labor difficulties to the onset of the Depression. Peopling his narrative with a vast array of characters—among them, sometimes in cameo, Benito Mussolini, Diego Rivera (whose assistant had to implore construction workers not to pee on the master’s murals), V.I. Lenin, Henry Luce, and, of course, John D. Rockefeller, then the wealthiest man in the world, and his son Nelson, whose oversight turned out to be of criticalimportance—Okrent takes readers on an improbably wild ride that, in the end, will leave them wondering how the vaulting skyscraper ever got built, but glad that it did. A dexterous work of urban and architectural history, and a passionate tribute to the grand buildings of old New York. Agent: Liz Darhansoff
A great book. Nuanced, clever and rollicking, it's nonfiction as a work of art. (The New York Observer)
Altogether stirring and vivid and enjoyable. (The New Yorker)
Puckish good humor and elegant prose. (The Wall Street Journal)
Delightful and exhaustive (but never exhausting)à the dazzling, complex story of how New York's acropolis came to be. (The Smithsonian)
| BN ID: | 2940173517272 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tantor Audio |
| Publication date: | 10/31/2019 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
It was inevitable that a man so comfortable within the embrace of the American patriciate would provoke such epithets. He had built a career, a reputation, and an unblemished belief in his own virtue upon a nearly holy devotion to the marriage of money and power. Wherever Butler traveled, his focus italicized by the vivid smear of his luxuriant eyebrows, he looked benevolently upon the deeds, and the needs, of America's last ruling class. Rising from a middle-class New Jersey upbringing, he had become a pillar of the Republican Party (and a plausible candidate for its presidential nomination in 1920), a ubiquitous presence on the circuits of international power (he was Gladstone's houseguest as a young man, dined with Kaiser Wilhelm in his early forties, met with Mussolini when Italian fascism was still new), a joiner and a leader so prolific in his associations and so enamored of his own renown that, year after year, he made certain that his was the longest entry in Who's Who. This annual exercise in self-celebration cataloged honorary doctorates (writer Alva Johnston, who thought well of him, called Butler "a harvesting machine of university degrees"); club memberships (in New York alone, he belonged to the Century, the Union, the University, the Lotos, and the Metropolitan); publications (mostly re-purposed speeches, few of them substantive, none of them memorable); and a sufficiency of other details that each year consumed more than a column and a half of tiny type, a mutable monument to his floodlit success.
Whatever it was he was seeking, the man worked at it. He produced all those speeches without the aid of ghostwriters, and his workday was frighteningly efficient. Letters poured from the President's House on Morningside Heights or from his office in Low Library in a volume that would overwhelm the hardiest archivist. He dictated each morning until noon, pacing back and forth, his coattails flying behind him, his secretaries desperately trying to keep up. Even the most trivial letters were answered within a day of their receipt at 60 Morningside Drive-or at his summer place in Southampton, on Long Island, or at the hotels in which he lived on his annual visits to Europe. In London he always stayed at the Berkeley, where he would receive wires from the States addressed in care of the hotel's comically inappropriate cable address: SYBARITE, LONDON.
Butler's European trips were largely the product of his long-held presidency of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a platform from which he helped negotiate the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928. This was a document that renounced war, a deeply Butlerian notion insofar as the nobility of its sentiment balanced precisely with its specious futility. Still, it was an accomplishment that earned him the Nobel Peace Prize three years later, which was a nice thing but probably not nearly as gratifying to Butler as the honor that would endure for forty-three years of his long life. The presidency of Columbia University had brought Butler everything he had-the club memberships, the patronage of the Republican hierarchy, the offer of railroad presidencies extended by E. H. Harriman and J. P. Morgan. But it had also brought him a problem that by his own admission had vexed the university's board of trustees (and, therefore, Butler himself) since the day he had been installed as Columbia's president in 1902: what to do with the eleven acres of midtown Manhattan that Columbia owned-land that produced so very little, and that if properly exploited could be worth so very, very much.
Butler was not the first Columbia president to salivate over the potential revenue from the land, originally almost four full blocks stretching from 47th to 51st Street, from Fifth Avenue nearly all the way to Sixth. For decades the land had looked to Columbia's officers and trustees much like a lamb chop must look to a wolf. But long before the institutional drooling had begun, the property was more nuisance than asset, acquired almost as a sort of booby prize in a state distribution of public lands.
Originally part of the Dutch-controlled Common Lands assembled by Peter Minuit in 1624, the acreage that Butler would eventually turn into Columbia's dowry became, by the end of the seventeenth century, property of the City of New York. But the city, such as it was, still lay huddled around the southern tip of Manhattan, and this twenty-acre chunk of hilly slopes and rocky promontories might as well have been in Poughkeepsie.
To David Hosack, though, it was a convenient and comfortable ride up the carriage road that ran along the spine of Manhattan Island. Hosack was a man of parts, most of them glittering: physician, scholar, gentleman botanist, salonnier, friend to both Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. Through a provident marriage and his own native talents, he had by 1800 become one of the foremost citizens of the growing city. His portrait was painted by Rembrandt Peale; Tocqueville wrote of the pleasures of Hosack's table. He was also a professor at the College of Physicians and Surgeons-precursor of Columbia's medical school-and longed for a piece of land that he could turn into a garden of materia medica, a sort of natural pharmacy.
Finding the ideal conditions for his garden about three and a half miles up the carriage road from the heart of inhabited New York, in 1801 he purchased the plot from the city for slightly less than five thousand dollars. Within three years the Elgin Botanical Garden, named after Hosack's father's birthplace in Scotland, bloomed with species from all over the world, some of them rare items contributed by Thomas Jefferson. A sixty-two-foot-long greenhouse anchored a row of structures running west from present-day Fifth Avenue. The entire plot was, Hosack noted with satisfaction, encircled by a "belt of forest trees and shrubs judiciously chequered and mingled," which were in turn enclosed by an imposing stone wall, two and a half feet thick and seven feet high.
Many years later a student of Hosack's recalled his mentor as "a man of profuse expenditure" who "had he the wealth of Astor" would still never have had enough. Over the nearly ten years he owned the Elgin plot, Hosack tried to prove his student's point, spilling nearly $100,000 into the garden until his wife's fortune could no longer bear the leakage. Unable to find a buyer for land he could no longer afford, he turned to the state legislature, where he had many friends, for relief. After two years' effort, Hosack was able to persuade the lawmakers to give him $75,000 for a parcel of land that no one wanted.
Including the state of New York. Soon the spot to which the city's grandees had once proudly brought their European visitors became a near ruin. When the trustees of Columbia College came hat in hand to the state government seeking funds, just as their brethren at Union and Hamilton Colleges had done recently and successfully, the tapped-out legislature considered its empty pockets and instead gave Columbia land. The college trustees, whose existing buildings were confined to a plot of land on Park Place, some four miles away in downtown Manhattan, were more bemused than gratified. The trustees turned over responsibility for the plot to the son of a past Columbia president, but Clement Moore proved a better light poet ("'Twas the Night Before Christmas") than an agricultural manager, and the place sank into utter decrepitude. By 1823 the best Columbia could do with Hosack's Folly was rent it to a private individual for $125 a year and taxes.
The evanescent Eden that was the Elgin Garden would manifest itself in the life of the city several times over the next century. Many of the surviving plant specimens were shipped off to the Bloomingdale Asylum in distant Morningside Heights, where they were planted on what would decades later become the site of Low Library, the dominant building on Columbia's eventual campus. The Elgin itself became the model for the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx; Hosack's large collection of horticultural texts was incorporated into its library; And both the carriage road that led to the garden and the pathway that fronted its south-facing expanse found their eventual forms in the city's decision, in 1807, to appoint a commission to plan New York's future. When they emerged from their deliberations four years later, the commissioners put forth a scheme to organize mile after mile of empty Manhattan terrain on a grid of 12 numbered avenues running north and south, and 155 similarly labeled streets cross-hatching the island east and west. It was, wrote architect Rem Koolhaas in 1994, "the most courageous act of prediction in Western civilization: the land it divides, unoccupied; the population it describes, conjectural; the buildings it locates, phantoms; the activities it frames, non-existent."
But the grid gave names to the carriage road, which became Sixth Avenue, and to the pathway in front of the greenhouse, which became 50th Street. And what was soon known as Columbia's Upper Estate (to distinguish it from the Lower Estate, its property downtown near City Hall) was now fixed on the map, and in the city's history.
In 1838, when the first crosstown streets of the city's courageous imaginings were finally opened up in the area, Columbia's nearly valueless land suddenly had a future. But there was no agreement at Columbia regarding what that future might be. The original downtown campus, a relic of the school's beginnings as King's College in 1747, was at best inadequate, and the prospect of a move to the leafy precincts of the Upper Estate was enticing. But so was the new opportunity, presented by the areas incipient development, to do what colleges must do: make money. One faction believed the property was too valuable to use for education; the opposing view found its expression in the complaint of trustee Samuel B. Ruggles, who in 1854 wondered "at what point in the coming half century our speculating, land-loving, avaricious propensities are to cease, and our legitimate educational duties are to commence."
Land-loving avarice pinned educational duties to the mat. One chunk of the property, sixteen lots at the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 48th Street, had already been sold to the Dutch Reformed Church. A few years later the remaining frontage along Fifth Avenue between 48th and 49th Streets went to the Goelet family, landowners whose substantial Manhattan holdings-fifty-five acres in all-derived from the two Goelet brothers who had inherited the land from the man whose two daughters they had wisely married. Proceeds from the sales covered taxes, made a contribution to Columbia's operating costs, and built, at last, the new campus on a two-acre plot down the road, east of Madison Avenue at 49th Street. Continuing income was expected to come, someday, from long-term ground leases on all that land in the Upper Estate.
But in the late 1850s, ambitions flowering within the Roman Catholic archdiocese of New York-hardly a Columbia ally-suddenly spiked the land's value. Brownstone houses rose in what Edith Wharton called a "chocolate-coloured coating of the most hideous stone ever quarried," but which nonetheless produced perfectly lovely rents. Hosack's land became the virtual guarantor of Columbia's future solvency, not the last time, it would play so noble a role.
The man who decreed a new St. Patrick's Cathedral on the plot facing the northernmost block of the Upper Estate was John J. "Dagger John" Hughes, the first archbishop of New York. Hughes was part cleric, part politician (antecedent of the Tammany bosses, he successfully ran slates of his own candidates for public office), and all Irishman. The city's established German Catholics had made way for the wave upon wave of Irish immigrants who had flowed into New York in the previous two decades, and the Vatican had provided them with one of their own as a leader. Hughes almost instantly made the church the center of Irish life in New York, both the symbol of his people's aspirations and the instrument by which they would achieve them.
The trustees and officers of Columbia may have been, every one of them, Protestant members of the city's commercial and genealogical elite, and may have included among their number, ex officio, the city's Episcopal bishop, but they could hardly have objected to the grand plans that Hughes revealed on August 15, 1858. The Irish place in the city virtually certified by Hughes's action, a crowd of 100,000 deliriously happy Catholics watched as the archbishop presided over the laying of the cornerstone for a building which, he said at the time, would cost more than $1.5 million. Never mind that the final cost, after more than two decades of construction, would exceed $4 million; never mind that, at the time of the cornerstone ceremony, Hughes had in hand pledges amounting to all of $73,000. Wrote one historian, "Hughes believed that if you took on a challenge, you would perforce rise to meet it."
Once met, Hughes's challenge transformed New York. By the Civil War, Fifth Avenue had already begun to evolve into the city's grandest thoroughfare, even if the grandeur largely resided below 23rd Street. But with the declarative punctuation of a lavish Gothic cathedral (even a Catholic one) inscribed at 50th Street, the northward rush accelerated. Almost as an ironic comment on the great gray cathedral, in a handsome residence one block north, with a staff of seven servants, lived Madame Restell, whose eminence as New York's leading abortionist had made her as wealthy as she was infamous. But just south of St. Patrick's rose a more congenial neighbor, the Buckingham Hotel. The Buckingham boasted in its advertising that "there is no noise, no confusion of porters or waiters, no loungers or patrons of the bar who are not guests of the house." This was exactly the sort of reassurance that a thirty-eight-year-old oilman from Cleveland might have sought before moving his young family into the hotel in 1877.
Continues...
Excerpted from GREAT FORTUNE by DANIEL OKRENT Copyright © 2003 by Last Laugh, Inc.. Excerpted by permission.
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