The tree changes every year.
Somewhere in America, the tallest and finest Norway spruce is chosen, cut, and brought to New York. Tens of thousands of lights are strung on its branches. It is lit. In January, it disappears. Next year, a different tree comes.
And yet the whole world looks at the same spot every year.
The Tree
Every year in late November, the news carries word of the lighting ceremony. My birthday falls around then. It arrives all at once — the birthday, Christmas coming, the year ending. The season when anticipation and regret always coexist.
No one decreed this. No one knows exactly when it started. It’s simply understood — at Christmas, you see the Rockefeller tree. An unspoken agreement held by the whole world.
I never once thought to ask: who made this place?
The Workers
Go back to December 1933.
The Great Depression. Twenty-five percent unemployment across America. In New York alone, 750,000 people had lost their jobs. And in the middle of all this, a massive construction project was underway in Midtown Manhattan. Fourteen buildings. The largest private construction project in history.
That December, the construction workers — the men who had spent their days hauling steel beams — set up a tree in the plaza before they went home. They decorated it with paper, tinfoil, and tin cans. That was everything.
That was the beginning of this place.
On September 20, 1932, a photograph was taken on a steel beam 69 floors above the construction site — 850 feet in the air. Eleven men sitting on the beam’s edge eating lunch. No safety equipment. New York spread out beneath their feet. Their expressions are remarkably calm. There was an unwritten rule on construction sites then: when building a skyscraper, you estimated a certain number of deaths per floor. They came anyway. Fifteen dollars a day — seven times a factory worker’s daily wage. The photograph is called “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper.” The most famous lunch photograph in history.
Top of the Rock
There is an observation deck at the top of that building.
In 2005, Top of the Rock had just opened. At that point, there were only two places in New York where you could see the city from this height. The Empire State Building, and here.
I stood at the glass wall. New York’s nightscape spread out like stars across the sky. And in the middle of it all, the Empire State Building stood alone.
Rockefeller Center is the symbol of Christmas. The Empire State Building is the symbol of the New York skyline. But the best place to see the Empire State Building is from the top of Rockefeller Center.
The Name
Behind all of this is one name.
Rockefeller. Among the names of capitalists, is there another known so widely — and so familiarly — across the entire world? Every Christmas, the whole world sees the plaza bearing this name. Warm, spectacular, beautiful.
And yet the man who built this place initially didn’t want his name attached to it. He wanted to call it “Metropolitan Square.” A publicist persuaded him — the Rockefeller name would attract tenants. That is how the name was placed here.
Rockefeller University, the Cloisters, MoMA, the UN headquarters site, Lincoln Center. This name is written across New York’s skyline.
But what kind of person was the one who first made this name?
That story begins somewhere unexpected.
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