Why Are Rockefellers Moving From 30 Rock? ‘We Got a Deal’
By SAM ROBERTS
NOV. 23, 2014
The family
is leaving 30 Rockefeller Plaza, open since 1933, and moving to headquarters
across 49th Street. Credit
Damon Winter/The New York Times
Ever since it opened in
1933, a 70-story limestone skyscraper has towered over mid-Manhattan as a
symbol of global capitalism and of a prolific American family that remains
synonymous with prodigious wealth.
The family patriarch, John
D. Rockefeller, was
America’s first billionaire, and it was his son, John Jr., who dauntlessly
broke ground for 30 Rockefeller Plaza in the midst of the Great Depression. Through
it all, into what is now the seventh generation, the Rockefellers’ vast
financial and personal empire has been managed by as many as 200 employees from
a lofty command post adorned with priceless Impressionist and Modern artwork.
A magnet for pilgrimages by
luminaries like Frank Sinatra and Nelson Mandela, the suites once filled three
entire floors (the equivalent of about one and a half football fields).
Collectively, they were always known humbly and simply as “Room 5600.”
But in 2000, the Rockefellers
sold off 30 Rock and nine other landmark Rockefeller Center office
buildings in the 22-acre Art Deco complex to Jerry I. Speyer and the Lester
Crown family of Chicago, though they retained their presence in the building by
keeping one floor as a rented space.
Photo
The grandsons of John D.
Rockefeller in an undated photograph taken at the family’s office at 30
Rockefeller Plaza: from left, David, Laurance, John D. III, Nelson and
Winthrop. The family’s management company is moving to smaller quarters. Credit
Philippe Halsman/Magnum Photos
Now, they have decided to leave the building entirely. By this time next
year, they will have vacated the 56th-floor aerie they have occupied since 1933
and moved to somewhat less rarefied headquarters across 49th Street.
One of the country’s great
dynastic families is downsizing.
Forbes estimates the entire
family is worth $10 billion, which would rank it 24th among the nation’s
richest families. And while there was one John D., there are now hundreds of
Rockefellers.
But like any discreet
tenant, David Rockefeller Jr., John D.’s great-grandson, would say only, “We
got a deal we are not at liberty to speak about.”
Mr. Speyer, the chairman of
Tishman Speyer, which co-owns Rockefeller Center, also declined to discuss any
details. But, he said, “I would be surprised if they weren’t worried
about rent. I think sensible people respect money.”
The Rockefellers are by no
means pleading poverty. As public-spirited philanthropists, they have endured
pretty much intact longer than most American oligarchies that originated in the
late 19th-century Gilded Age.
“What’s different is there
are nearly 300 of us now,” David Jr. said.
And many of them no longer
feel beholden to a paternalistic family office that since 1882 has managed the
Rockefellers’ financial and personal affairs, including taxes and accounting,
insurance, investments, philanthropy, art, speechmaking and publicity.
Photo
30 Rockefeller Plaza in 1933, the year it opened. Credit Samuel H.
Gottscho/Collection of the Museum of the City of New York
“The family office used to
mean everything, the whole shebang,” said David Jr., 73, a member of the fourth
generation.
John D.’s bust and portrait
still grace the otherwise anonymous reception area on the 56th floor of 30
Rockefeller Plaza. (To put the founder’s wealth in perspective, the $1 billion
that he had accumulated by 1916 would be worth $30 billion today, adjusted for
inflation. When he died in 1937, his assets equaled 1.5 percent of the nation’s
economic output — the equivalent of $340 billion today, or more than four times
Bill Gates’s worth, Forbes estimated.)
About 44 staff members will
work for the Rockefellers when they move to a 19,000-square-foot space at 1
Rockefeller Plaza around the middle of next year. Rockefeller & Company,
which manages the investments of the Rockefellers and other wealthy families,
has opened shop separately at 10 Rockefeller Plaza.
“We decided to start again
at 1 Rock,” David Jr. said. “This is the first time this generation has gotten
to say what their needs are.”
He will move into an office
in the 34-story building that faces the skating rink.
“Some people think higher
is better,” he said. “I like the human connection.”
Room 5600 was so lofty, The
New Yorker once wrote, that because of the Earth’s rotation, its occupants
would travel “more than a mile farther each day than the man in the street.”
After visiting the 56th
floor in 1935, (not long after the lobby briefly featured a problematic fresco
of Lenin), Le Corbusier, the architect, observed, “The great masters of
economic destiny are up there, like eagles, in the silence of their eminences.”
No one was underwhelmed.
“It was staggering, like walking into a private MoMA with a Gauguin, Miró and
other remarkable works of art and views of New York City that knocked your
socks off,” recalled Heather P. Ewing, an art historian who visited several
years ago.
Photo
Room 5600’s reception area, with a bust of John D. Rockefeller. Credit
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Richard Norton Smith, the
author of a new biography of Nelson A. Rockefeller, remembers an earlier first
impression: “I assumed Room 5600 was just that, a room, or, at most, a suite of
rooms. That it filled two floors then was surprising, but no more so than the
hierarchy of minions and assistant minions on hand to greet and guide visitors
through this Emerald City in the sky.”
To conspiracy theorists,
Room 5600 had an Orwellian ring. Peter Collier and David Horowitz wrote in “The
Rockefellers” that its mystique made it “the mysterium tremendum of the
Rockefeller Dynasty,” the place where “the Brothers gathered with their
illuminati of friends and advisers to make the decisions that would shake the
world.”
While the family has
dispersed geographically, many of the Rockefellers will convene next June at
their Pocantico Hills estate in Westchester County to celebrate the 100th
birthday of David Sr., who is the only surviving sibling of the “Brothers”
generation, John D.’s grandchildren.
Although they sat on
Rockefeller Center’s board, the sons of John D. Jr. still needed his permission
after World War II when they wanted to remodel a portion of the 56th floor into
identical 20-by-16-foot offices for each of them.
“Isn’t this impressive,”
Nelson Rockefeller prompted his father, after the renovations were completed.
To which John D. Jr.
supposedly replied, “Nelson, whom are we trying to impress?”
Although no sign identifies
Room 5600 and the glass doors that separate it from the elevator bank are
blank, plenty of presidential candidates and other notables found their way
there (Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine to see Laurance;
Mandela, Richard Gere and Bono to visit David).
Except for the original art
(David Sr.’s office includes a Gauguin, a circular Mondrian and a Signac), the
modern offices are largely understated (the baronial 16th-century furnishings
that John D. Jr. transported from Standard Oil headquarters at 26 Broadway were
long since dismantled and transported to Pocantico). Plans to decorate the new
offices are incomplete.
“Many of us have the
interest of Nelson and Dad,” David Jr. said. “I don’t know if we have the eye
or the pocketbook.”
With one brother still
alive, the dynastic office is being preserved, but in a different form and,
soon, in another place. Perhaps the allegorical bas-relief over the entrance to
1 Rockefeller Plaza epitomizes the family’s own metamorphosis. It is titled “Progress.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/24/nyregion/why-are-rockefellers-moving-from-30-rock-we-got-a-deal.html
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