Postcard Thursday: Rockefeller Center's Lost Opera House

Happy World Radio Day!

In honor of this holiday, here are a couple of pictures of the original "Radio City," Rockefeller Center.

Notice the difference between these two shots? The top postcard depicts Rockefeller Center before it had even been built. The low building in the foreground had originally been designed to be the home of the Metropolitan Opera, the anchor tenant of the center. The building -- known somewhat affectionately as the "hatbox" -- was to have been a state-of-the-art theater, replacing the opera company's outmoded and cramped headquarters on Broadway just south of Times Square. However, internal struggles at the Metropolitan Opera, where the building and the performance company had separate boards of directors, squashed the deal. The Met would not find a new home for another three decades, when its current theater at Lincoln Center went up.

When the deal between the center and the opera company fell apart, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had to scramble to find a replacement, ultimately choosing RCA, whose broadcasting arm, NBC, is still headquartered there today. This top postcard must have been produced sometime between the time the opera pulled out -- since it is labeled "Radio City," a nod to NBC's primary mode of broadcasting in those days -- but before the hatbox was removed from the plans.

The second postcard depicts the center as actually built. At the front are two of the center's international buildings, La Maison Francaise and the British Empire Building. These two short office towers are one of the topics of our Rockfeller chapter in Footprints in New York.

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Read more about Rockefeller Center in

Inside the Apple

and don't forget our next book

Footprints in New York comes out April 15, 2014, but you can pre-order today.

Art Deco Fascism in New York

courtesy of 20 Exchange Place

One of grandest Art Deco buildings in Lower Manhattan is 20 Exchange Place, the old City Bank-Farmers Trust Building (now a rental apartment building). The building was designed by the firm of Cross & Cross and erected in 1930, just after the merger of the National City Bank of New York and the Farmers Loan and Trust Company.

Though it can be hard to see from the street, perhaps the most notable decorative feature of the building is the array giant heads that adorn the tower at the nineteenth floor (right). These fourteen figures are the "Giants of Finance," vaguely based on Middle Eastern models.

Much more discernible from the street are the eleven coins that flank the entryway to the building. Each represents a country with which the bank did business, including at the bottom left an American Indian-head nickel prominently displaying the building's date. Above the nickel is an Italian 20 lira coin from 1927, when Italy was firmly under the control of the Fascists and Il Duce, Benito Mussolini.

On the left, the coin features a Roman fasces, the bundle of sticks with an axe that was a symbol of the ancient Roman Republic and co-opted by the Italian Fascists. At the lower right is carved "Meglio Vivere un Giorno da Leone Che Cento Anni da Pecora" ("It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as sheep"), an older proverb that Mussolini had taken as his own.

The City Bank-Farmers Trust (which would later go on to become Citibank) was not the only place in the city to display Mussoilini-era imagery. At Rockefeller Center, the Palazzo d'Italia was originally decorated with a massive pyrex sculpture by Attilio Piccirilli entitled "Sempre Avanti Eterna Giovinezza" ("Advance Forward, Eternal Youth") that struck viewers as redolent with Fascist iconography. (The inscriptions on the side read "Art is work, work is art.")

On December 12, 1941, just five days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Piccirilli's sculpture was boarded over and in 1965 it was finally replaced with the current piece, "Italia," by Giacomo Manzu. However, all Fascist imagery was not erased: at the top of the building are Leo Lentelli's bas relief sculptures of the "Four Periods in Italian History," which depict ancient Rome, the Renaissance, the Unification of Italy, and Fascism (again, symbolized by a fasces).

Courtesy of Rockefeller Center

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There's much more on Art Deco New York
and the history of Rockefeller Center

in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

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