Abstract

"Mediating Real Estate in Midtown Manhattan"

Richard Popp, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (popp@uwm.edu)

In 1938, programmers at NBC received a novel proposal from their landlords at Rockefeller Center. Why not make greater use of the Center’s observation decks? Perched atop the 70-story RCA Building and wildly popular with tourists, the decks offered a panoramic view of greater Gotham. What if NBC turned this Olympian perspective into the basis for a radio series? Experts could lecture on everything from the region’s geologic formation to its systems of parks, ports, and highways. The network passed, but the idea encapsulates many of the dynamics that shaped the uneasy partnership of media corporations and real-estate developers that was becoming one of US capitalism’s key relationships in the interwar years. As the largest development in Manhattan’s history and home to the world’s greatest concentration of communications firms, Rockefeller Center was a powerful embodiment of these ties. Nor was it alone. Paramount Pictures and other media giants had also recently moved into towering headquarters built atop Midtown’s old five-story landscape of walkups and theaters. Doing so brought them into business with industrialists and landholders, who, believing that skyscrapers were “machines that made the land pay” (to paraphrase architect Cass Gilbert), had plunged into commercial realty.

As Max Page argues, early-twentieth-century Americans were accustomed to reading New York’s volatile cityscape through a lens of “creative destruction.” Having assumed a lead role in this drama, media firms sought to capitalize on that perceptual framework by promoting their ability to transform the revenues yielded selling light and sound into massive interventions in the built environment. Drawing on the NBC archives, this paper explores such efforts, paying close attention to how, despite their Promethean ambitions, the operations and public image of these headquarters were nonetheless conditioned by the surrounding neighborhoods, infrastructure systems, social stratifications, and remembered landscapes into which they had been implanted.