Nineteen buildings, a sunken plaza that only became an ice rink because nobody could think of anything else to do with it, and the best of the Midtown observation decks on top.
Built in the worst possible decade
John D. Rockefeller Jr. signed a lease on this land in 1928 to build an opera house. The crash came in 1929, the opera pulled out, and he was left personally liable for a twenty-four-year lease on three blocks of Midtown with no tenant and no plan. What he did instead was build the whole thing anyway, privately financed, through the Depression — nineteen buildings, forty thousand workers at peak, finished in 1939. It is the largest private building project of the era and it kept a great many people in work at a moment when very little else did.
The photograph of eleven ironworkers eating lunch on a beam with their feet over Manhattan was taken here, on the 69th floor of the RCA Building, in September 1932. It was a publicity shot. The men were real ironworkers and the beam was real; the lunch was staged.
The plaza and the rink
The sunken plaza was a commercial failure. It was designed as a shopping concourse entrance and nobody used it, so in 1936 the management flooded it as an ice rink on what was meant to be a temporary basis. It has been there ever since.
The rink is small — smaller than every photograph makes it look — and it is expensive per session, and the queue in December is substantial. Skating on it is a specific bucket-list thing rather than a good skate. If you want a proper rink, Bryant Park and Prospect Park are both better and one of them is free to enter.
In summer the rink becomes a restaurant terrace. The gilded Prometheus behind it stays year-round.
The Christmas tree goes up in November and is lit at the start of December. The crowd around it in the weeks after is one of the densest in the city, and the surrounding blocks are barricaded into one-way pedestrian flows. It is beautiful and it is not relaxing. Early morning, before nine, is the only civilised time to see it.
Above and below
Top of the Rock is on floors 67 to 70 of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. It is the observation deck to choose if you are only doing one, for a reason that is obvious once stated: from here the Empire State Building is in your photograph. From the Empire State Building it is not.
Underneath the complex is a concourse of shops and passages connecting the buildings, built so that workers never had to go outside in winter. It still runs, and it is a genuinely useful shortcut in bad weather.
Radio City Music Hall on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 50th is part of the complex and does a backstage tour worth taking if Art Deco interiors interest you at all.
The Rockefeller Center art programme is unusually good and mostly ignored — Lee Lawrie’s Atlas facing St Patrick’s across Fifth Avenue, the Prometheus, and Diego Rivera’s mural, which Rockefeller had destroyed in 1934 after Rivera refused to remove a portrait of Lenin from it. José María Sert’s replacement is still on the wall of the lobby at 30 Rock.
More Landmarks
Statue of Liberty
A French gift that arrived in 214 crates and spent a year in pieces on an island nobody wanted. The ferry is the ticket — everything else is an upgrade.
Brooklyn Bridge
Fourteen years, three Roeblings and twenty-odd deaths to build. Free to walk, best at seven in the morning, and the direction you cross matters more than the time.
Times Square
Loud, bright, and genuinely worth twenty minutes once. Go after dark, keep your hands on your bag, and do not eat here.