Grand Plans Still Live at Rockefeller Center : Urban design: Rumors of financial troubles bounce harmlessly off the facades of the cathedral-like complex, where renovation and expansion are scheduled.

The man who dreamed it; the men who designed it; the men who knitted together the bricks and the steel beams, are all dead, and their monument, Rockefeller Center, a symbol of the human spirit, was reported to be critically ill earlier this year.

But it is still here, alive and well, rising cathedral-like in the heart of Manhattan. A tribute to one man’s gamble and courage some 60 years ago, Rockefeller Center still offers premier office space with even braver plans on the drawing boards.

More than that, it is the embodiment of Manhattan, perhaps even more than the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, a tourist draw that is truly accessible, a man-made park where people work and play, where dreams are born, careers made and lost, a symbol of a city that is itself a symbol.

After the blizzard its snows disappear as if by magic before it can turn to slush. It is a spring garden at Eastertide, a walkway of angels at Christmas, a panoply of roof plantings and restaurants, a dance of umbrellas in the summer breeze, an ice theater for the thrusting hearts of skaters, a trysting place for lovers, a haven for daydreamers.

When the year ends, it is a grand communal Christmas tree.

It was John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s gamble, stuck with a hefty land lease in the middle of the Great Depression. Partly to express his faith in the U.S. economy, partly to make that lease pay in rent, he built Rockefeller Center with his own money, an architectural triumph and the epitome of urban planning, even down to underground loading docks to get the trucks off the street.

When a model of Rockefeller Center was unveiled in the depths of the Depression, the New York Times called it an aberrational monstrosity, architectural critic Lewis Mumford saw it as “a clot of congestion,” and the New York Herald Tribune simply said, “Ugly.”

The center, which opened in 1932 and was finished in 1941, has become “a city within a city” on land that almost two centuries ago was a physician’s garden to grow medicinal herbs. Up until John D. Jr. got his hands on it, it had decayed to the dust of brothels, rooming houses and speak-easies.

Today its buildings are both a federal and a city landmark.

So when the financial journal Barrons came out with an article early this year saying it was in trouble, burdened with a $1.3-billion mortgage, lower rentals and a flood of leases coming up for renewal, rumors flew: It was going into Chapter 7, Chapter 11, the wastebasket.

Says Vincent E. Silvestri, vice president of The Rockefeller Group, “We are not in Chapter 7 nor any other chapter in that book.”

Lorian Marlantes, president and CEO of Rockefeller Center Management Corp., says: “We are meeting our financial obligations and we have every reason to think we will continue to meet our financial obligations. End of story.”

The center has just substantially completed a $260-million improvement program that was begun in the late 1980s to bring this limestone and steel child of the 1930s into the computer-heavy world of the year 2000. Much of the interior artwork and the outdoor statuary and the decorative exterior panels have been polished and rebuilt for the first time since it opened.

Of the 15 million square feet of rentable area, 2.9 million come up for renewal by September. By aggressively making deals, and the improvements, 1.9 million have been re-signed and Rockefeller Center officials say they will lease the rest before the year is out, keeping its occupancy rate at 96%.

But the Rockefeller Group, the ultimate investment entity, is private and need not divulge its finances to anyone, so its operations are open to speculation. Further complicating the picture was the sale to Mitsubishi Estate Co. of Japan of 80% of the Rockefeller Group in 1989 for $1.3 billion.

But an informal survey of Manhattan realtors confirms that it is still prime office space in a sea of prestigious buildings and new leases are going at a hot pace.

The center’s size is daunting. Cleaning the offices alone is the equivalent of 10,000 six-room houses. That job falls to just under 900 workers who come in when the offices close. Window washers who tend 48,758 office windows start work at dark, finish before noon. Every window is cleaned every two weeks.

Room temperature, elevators with doors open, elevators with doors closed, virtually every variable in the office environment is monitored on the computers of the Global Control Center in the subbasement.

Any thief with the audacity to snatch a purse within the center is chased and brought to ground by the guard force and doormen who have pursued miscreants as far as Times Square, aided and abetted by New York’s Finest. The guards have no authority beyond citizen’s arrest. Many are former policemen.

There are 100,000 telephones in the center and 97,500 locks, and round-the-clock locksmiths. The Center’s tenants use 476 million gallons of water a year, not counting those years when the limestone faces of the buildings are washed down by cascades of ordinary tap water, which restores their original color.

There are 388 elevators and 67 escalators. The elevators travel nearly 2 million miles a year and make a million stops. The fastest is the express to the 65th floor of the General Electric Building. It makes the trip in 37 seconds at 1,400 feet a minute.

It is far from John D. Jr.’s original dream. He intended at first to build a new home for the Metropolitan Opera, but when his co-backers backed out, he was left with an expensive tract and a hefty rent.

So he changed direction. He would build modern office buildings and a pair of theaters. He hired a consortium of architects to put the plans together. The centerpiece would be the broadcast center that would house the fledgling, but growing, Radio Corporation of America and the National Broadcasting Co.

The Metropolitan in a barn-like building at 39th and Broadway would have to wait for its new home.

The chief architects emerged from the consortium to be Raymond Hood and Wallace Harrison who devised an open spaces plan of setbacks and lower buildings like pawns and kings on a chessboard.

The Mexican muralist Diego Rivera was commissioned to decorate the lobby of the RCA Building--now the GE Building--with a mural celebrating the progress of man, but he painted in the face of Lenin on one of the individuals. John D. Rockefeller Jr. would not tolerate it. When Rivera refused to replace it the mural was scrapped and replaced by the towering figures by Jose Maria Sert.

The recriminations were so loud that humorist Will Rogers entered the fray because “there are two things that a dumb guy knows as much about as a smart one, and that’s art and inflation.”

He was forced, he said, to side with Rockefeller because flat-out the artist had failed to give him what he had ordered. Rogers concluded, “Now the above is said in no disparagement of the Mexican artist, for he is the best in the world, but you should never try to fool a Rockefeller with oils.”

The outside panel of the then-RCA building, by Lee Lawrie, represents wisdom. Lawrie also did the 14,000-pound statue of Atlas which stands before the main entrance of the International Building, and a dozen other sculptures.

Paul Manship created the soaring figure of Prometheus which dominates the skating rink and plaza, crafted in bronze and covered with gold leaf.

The 10-ton, stainless-steel panel above the main entrance to the Associated Press Building by Isamu Noguchi is called “News” and represents five men with notebook and pencil, camera, telephone, teletype and wires radiating out to the world.

If nothing else attracts the eyes of visitors, the annual Christmas tree lighting has become an American tradition. The tree has been lit on national television by everyone from Kate Smith and Howdy Doody to Liza Minnelli and Glenn Close.

When, during the oil crisis of 1973, President Nixon asked Americans to forgo outdoor ornamental lighting, the tree suddenly became a problem.

Jim Reed, now a vice president of the center’s management, was then in charge of erecting the tree, a ritual since workers put up the first one in 1931 on the site of the British Empire Building.

Reed was swamped with calls, “people saying you have to light the tree. Some had suggestions, like a windmill on the roof to generate electricity.”

“Someone else said why not put a treadmill out there hooked to a generator. I’ll come by and walk it.”

Even CBS called and offered to help, although the tree stood out in front of rival NBC.

The center solved the problem by decorating the tree with reflective disks that were lit by many fewer miniature lights.

Trees have come from as far away as Ottawa, Canada. The tallest tree ever was a 90-foot Norway spruce from Mount Kisco, N.Y., in 1948. There is a limit, however. The trailer that brings the tree into the city can only telescope to 100 feet.

When World War II came to Rockefeller Center, so did the FBI. On Dec. 7, 1941, they broke into the German, Japanese and Italian consulates and offices to find diplomats burning papers.

“Wild Bill” Donovan, the American lawyer who headed the OSS, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, had offices in 30 Rockefeller Plaza, guarded by military police. Guy Eyssell, former president of Radio City Music Hall, remembers one night when military police rushed into his offices above the theater with drawn guns. They said there were spies on the roof, looking down on Donovan’s offices. It turned out they were sandbags, shrouded by blackout shadows.

The British had an espionage facility camouflaged as a trade office in the British Empire Building. One former intelligence officer says he was being pursued by enemy agents and owed his life to an escape through the subbasement labyrinths of the center.

Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia placed a curfew over the center as a wartime security measure. Eyssell says that when LaGuardia told restaurateur Toots Shor, whose establishment was across 51st Street from the center, that he would have to close early, Shor shrugged his massive shoulders and said, “I guess if a guy ain’t drunk by midnight, he’s not going to get drunk.”

While the center plans were still being drawn, two leaseholders on 6th Avenue held out and the architects had to build around them. One of those sites is now Hurley’s Bar, known as a hangout for NBC people. The other, formerly a drugstore, will be transformed into a theme restaurant like Planet Hollywood and the Hard Rock Cafe. It will open in 1995 as Television City.