Great Fortune

Book Description

In this hugely appealing book, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, acclaimed author and journalist Daniel Okrent weaves together themes of money, politics, art, architecture, business, and society to tell the story of the majestic suite of buildings that came to dominate the heart of midtown Manhattan and with it, for a time, the heart of the world. At the center of Okrent’s riveting story are four remarkable individuals—tycoon John D. Rockefeller, his ambitious son Nelson Rockefeller, real estate genius John R. Todd, and visionary skyscraper architect Raymond Hood. In the tradition of David McCullough’s The Great Bridge, Ron Chernow’s Titan, and Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, Great Fortune is a stunning tribute to an American landmark that captures the heart and spirit of New York at its apotheosis.

Amazon.com

Those of us who love New York tend to love the city passionately, for its past as well as its present. Daniel Okrent's Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center is a book for New Yorkers from Ashtabula to Zimbabwe: a study of ambition, audacity, and deal-making on a grand scale that led to the construction of some of the most famous skyscrapers in the world. The cast of characters includes not only the many and diverse members of the Rockefeller family, but other powerful New York institutions such as Columbia University, the Metropolitan Opera, the Museum of Modern Art, and The New York Times--not to mention the radical Mexican artist Diego Rivera, the New Yorker cartoonist William Steig, the Marx Brothers, and a bevy of "Rockettes." Okrent's narrative neatly balances the epic and the intimate; he offers both authoritative pronouncements on modern architecture and reams of good gossip. Like New York itself, Great Fortune contains multitudes: densely packed, it remains surprisingly--and welcomingly--commodious.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　--Tim Page

From Publishers Weekly

Just as Okrent's Nine Innings beautifully telescoped all of baseball into a single game in 1982 between the Milwaukee Brewers and the Baltimore Orioles, so the former Life editor and Time Inc. executive finds in the creation of Rockefeller Center a good deal of New York and many of the contradictions in American life as the country worked to emerge from the Depression. Built for profit on a run-down stretch of midtown between Fifth and Sixth Avenues called the Upper Estate-myriad lots that underwriter John D. Rockefeller Jr. slowly and inexorably leveraged into an available whole-the seven-year project was second only to the WPA in temporary job creation, though as Okrent shows, the project was far from worker-centered. While one of its originally intended (and abandoned) roles was to provide a new home for the Metropolitan Opera, the sprawling complex came to house a hydra-headed media center anchored by NBC, RKO and RCA, yet saw its gorgeous Center Theatre torn down in 1954 (though Radio City Music Hall and the Rainbow Room remain). But the real stories here come from individual contributions to the huge project, from Junior (and his six children) to hired-artist Georgia O'Keeffe and her apparently abusive photographer-gallerist husband, Alfred Stieglitz; the Roxyettes and the Glee Club singers; engineer O.B. Hanson (inventor of "studio audiences"); and Ray Hood (who ascends from radiator-cover designer to architect of the "Radiator Building"). That the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree tradition began during construction in 1931 as a "modest balsam" decorated by site workers with cranberries, "garlands of paper and... a few tin cans" is just one of thousands of details (including the famous commissioning and destruction of Diego Rivera's murals) that make this magisterial account, itself seven years in the making, fascinating and immediate.

From Booklist

Rockefeller Center, a complex of buildings in Manhattan built over an eight- to ten-year period the during Great Depression, was the result of a philanthropic gesture by John D. Rockefeller Jr. that took on a life of its own. It took a coterie of legal firms, bankers, architects, and real estate moguls, not to mention thousands of laborers, to create the most ambitious construction project since the pyramids. The scale was unprecedented for its time: 154,000 tons of structural steel; 1,000,000 square feet of window glass; 200 miles of brass pipe; and so on, with 42 elevators in five separate banks necessary to carry its occupants on their appointed rounds. With more office space than the much taller Empire State Building, this architectural marvel was produced to make optimal use of light and air flow before the advent of fluorescent lighting and air-conditioning. The individual characters and their stories form the backbone of this feat, including the famous episode of the controversial Diego Rivera wall mural that was never seen by the public.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　David Siegfried

About Author

Daniel Okrent is a prizewinning journalist, author, and television commentator. For many years he was a senior editorial executive at Time Inc. In 2003 he was appointed the first Public Editor of the New York Times.

Book Dimension:

length: (cm)23.5 　　　　　　　　　width:(cm) 16