Welcome to the Big City Book Club. Our live discussion about “Great Fortune,†by Daniel Okrent, will take place from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. Eastern time in the comments section below, but you can post your thoughts and questions anytime.
Opening thoughts from Ginia Bellafante, the Big City columnist, follow directly. Responses from Mr. Okrent and the novelist and cultural critic Kurt Andersen will be posted this afternoon.
Ginia Bellafante: At this evening’s convening of the Big City Book Club, we’re going to be talking about Daniel Okrent’s “Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center,†a rich history of the creation of one of New York’s most dramatic landmarks. That description threatens to undersell a book that leaves virtually no New York obsession unmined: made wealth, inherited wealth, real estate, art, design, philanthropy, society, thwarted ambition, realized ambition, eccentricity. (The appearance of a woman at a speakeasy wearing a toilet seat around her neck? Check. And that’s before we get to a chief architect â€" Ray Hood â€" who spent the last year of his life on a diet of brussels sprouts.)
The book chronicles how a sketchy patch of land in Midtown Manhattan owned by Columbia University and given over to vice ultimately became home to a reigning symbol of Deco glamour, media primacy and also the contrarian spirit that animates so much of life in New York: Rockefeller Center went up over the 1930s dismissive of the International Style that had so much emerged as the preferred flavor of the time.
Behind it all is John D. Rockefeller Jr. â€" or Junior, as he was known â€" a man with a feisty wife and few obvious passions beyond the wish to avoid seeming like an idler. I found myself thinking throughout that the book lends itself to a parlor game of alternative history. The unparalleled giving for which the Rockefellers were responsible resulted in the donation of the land on which the United Nations was built, the development of Memorial Sloan-Kettering, the Cloisters and Rockefeller University, a premiere research institute. In the absence of that one family, would anyone else have stepped in and provided in this way, and how might New York be different?
Another question this book raises: What is it psychologically that makes New Yorkers â€" maybe human beings in general â€" so often reflexively disparage any new, destined-to-become-iconic building? Rockefeller Center did not by any means get the love it receives today when it went up. There was little sense initially that it would be so cherished.
Speaking of instinctively hating the new: I find myself already cringing at the prospect of Park Avenue in Midtown lined with Shanghai-style skyscrapers. I refer here to the proposed rezoning of Midtown East, which the Bloomberg administration insists must happen so that New York’s commercial real estate market can remain globally competitive. Wouldn’t these buildings shadow Rock Center â€" and should we care if they do? Moreover, is there any argument to be made for New York retaining its New York-ness, however benighted an idea that might seem? Isn’t that the lesson of Rock Center in the end?
Joining our discussion will be Mr. Okrent and the novelist and culture critic Kurt Andersen, author of the best-selling novel “Heyday†and most recently “True Believers.â€
Kurt and Dan, take it away.
