The Center of New York’s Universe : To Insiders and Outsiders, the Rockefeller Complex Defines the Big Apple--Money Woes and All

It’s hard to fathom that Rockefeller Center, a monument to visual beauty and commercial power, has been bankrupt since May.

It’s hard to believe that financial wranglings were threatening the Emerald City.

But it has and they were, and yet the place continues to thrive, vibrating with 65,000 workers and tens of thousands of visitors daily, immaculately kept and wisely updated, soaring from the heart of Manhattan yet completely self-sustaining, a city unto itself.

Indeed, Rockefeller Center remains grander than the sum of all the people who have owned it or who would like to own it. And it’s a good thing. Because without it--without the flags flapping around the skating rink in winter and the flowers blooming in the gardens in spring and the plaza cafe aflutter with umbrellas in summer, and without the mammoth statue of Prometheus, recently re-coated in 24-carat gold leaf--people might stop believing in New York.

Yet the news here has at times been grave. Rumors of who might overtake this beaux-arts complex left it alternately a “ghost town,” “theme park” or “second-class.”

But even amid uncertainty, nothing could overwhelm the communal spirit of Christmas at Rockefeller Center and what it means to New York.

Last week, the “Christmas Spectacular” opened at Radio City Music Hall with Santa perched above the marquee directing a merry choir. Today, a 75-foot Norway spruce with boughs stretching 35 feet is being hoisted into place behind Prometheus. In the weeks to come, workers will string it with 25,000 tiny lights and erect a single white star up top. Already, all 110 seats at the Sea Grill, a pricey restaurant with a prime view of the tree and skaters, are booked for the Dec. 5 tree lighting.

The mood this Christmas is likely to be vastly improved after last week’s announcement of a rescue plan by investors including Goldman Sachs & Co. and David Rockefeller, raising expectations that the contentious bidding contest for Manhattan’s trophy cite might soon be over.

“I’m glad there is a Rockefeller still involved,” says Joseph Darnell, who manages the Sea Grill and reports that David Rockefeller, the octogenarian family patriarch, often lunches on seafood salad or grilled salmon at Table No. 2. “It definitely makes us feel more like a family.”

It was Rockefeller’s father, John D. Rockefeller Jr., who built the center with his own money in the middle of the Great Depression. Originally conceived as a commercial complex surrounding a new home for the Metropolitan Opera, that vision died with the stock market crash. But Rockefeller persisted after the opera house idea was scrubbed and went on to construct 14 skyscrapers from 1931 to 1940, adding four more to the 22-acre complex by the 1970s.

The centerpiece, the old RCA building, now home to General Electric, is a 70-story limestone slab made more dramatic with setbacks and art on the facade such as “Wisdom,” with its gigantic bearded central figure representing the creative power of the universe.

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Of course, the critics in the 1930s called the whole scheme monstrous or just plain ugly. But time and styles changed the popular view, and by the 1940s one critic praised it for giving New Yorkers “a good show.” In 1982, a New York Times critic wrote: “It is a place at once grandiose and intimate, bespeaking both the power of the American fortune that built it and the communal needs of the people who use it.”

New Yorkers, particularly, can’t resist the place.

Just the other day on the way to her dentist, Elizabeth Ann Sloan, an 11-year-old schoolgirl, dragged her mother to see the skaters and the Metropolitan Museum of Art gift shop.

“It’s like so entertaining, you know, like going to the movies,” gushed Elizabeth, later pointing with a giggle at a woman in a white cable knit sweater clumsily attempting a figure-eight on the rink. “It’s soooooooo glamorous.”

Tourists, schooled by a hundred films using the center’s skyscrapers and plazas as a backdrop for romance, are drawn to the landmark. The other day, a tourist from Japan, walking backward and aiming her camera upward, burst out, “Beautiful! Beautiful! New York!”

The place also recalls moments from a more genteel past: Everywhere there are security guards in crisp, cranberry-colored uniforms politely answering requests for directions through the marble concourse underground or to subways. There’s still the great tradition of live broadcasts: in NBC’s No. 1-rated “Today” show with its street-side studio and “Saturday Night Live.”

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The behind-the-scenes agonies over mortgages and unpaid creditors, and squabbles between the wealthy owners about who had the bucks to make more concessions, remain elusive in this mix of marble and glitter, symbolism and history.

The center’s financial problems first became obvious in 1990, shortly after Mitsubishi Real Estate Inc. spent $1.4 billion for an 80% interest, leaving the Rockefeller family trusts with the remaining 20%. It was then that Manhattan’s office market began sinking under the weight of an eight-year building boom that created 54 million square feet of prime space in mid-town. Where once it had seemed likely that rents would reach $60 a square foot, they leveled off at $35. The $75-a-square-foot rate that had been predicted for Rockefeller Center by 1994 when 3 billion square feet were up for renewal became ridiculous.

For three years the Rockefeller family fought to keep the center out of bankruptcy, but that effort ended in May when rancorous negotiations with Mitsubishi broke down and the Japanese real estate giant decided to use America’s strong Chapter 11 law to settle its bills and walk away from its billion-dollar-plus investment.

Since then several investors, including a group of the 40,000 shareholders that holds the center’s $1.3-billion mortgage, as well as Chicago real estate magnate Sam Zell, backed by Walt Disney Co. and others, took a shot at owning the prestige property.

In the meantime, despite the pitched battles, the center’s management realized that unless it kept pace with the competition, the center would lose status as one of New York’s prime office sites. In addition to NBC and parent company General Electric, Simon & Schuster, the Associated Press, Lazard Freres and Co., scores of fancy law firms, banks and international investment companies occupy space in the 15 million square feet of rentable area.

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In the last few years, management has completed a $260-million upgrade: Mechanical systems were overhauled; new air conditioning was added; lobbies and elevators were renovated. Subsequently, nearly all of the leases that were to expire by the end of 1994 were renewed, and occupancy this fall is at 88.3% and expected to climb by the end of the year to 94.6%, where it was last December.

Still it has not been a perfect effort--to bring steel buildings sheathed in Indiana limestone in the 1930s up to the technological standards of the 21st Century has been a challenge. And some tenants, soured by the bankruptcy proceedings and an occasional harrowing elevator ride, vacated.

In September, a financial firm moved out of its offices at 45 Rockefeller Center and moved into a building a few blocks down Fifth Avenue that had a more sophisticated security system.

“Everyone in our office had been stuck in an elevator over an extended period of time or had been disgusted by a bathroom light bulb that took three weeks to get changed,” says an executive who once got stuck bouncing 40 floors seven times at breakneck speed. “At first I was just annoyed,” she recalls. “Then I was terrified and thought, ‘You’re gonna die.’ ”

But even this disgruntled tenant concedes that with 388 elevators traveling 2 million miles annually, something is bound to go wrong. And she misses the views and says the office secretaries miss scurrying without a coat through the underground concourse on a chilly day to buy Christmas decorations at Woolworth’s.

So whether it’s Johnnie Cochran bringing the skaters to a standstill as he lunched at the Sea Grill last week, or a crowd lining up to buy tickets for the 6,000-seat Radio City Music Hall, or window washers attending to the 48,758 windows once every two weeks, Rockefeller Center, the mini-metropolis, still holds our affection.

Alexei Berezhkov, New York bureau chief of the Tass News Agency, summed up its advantages: “I feel as if every day here is a holiday. I feel every day here secure. I feel always supreme order.”