Rockefeller Center, once home of the world’s most modern industries and entertainments, is getting up there in years. While some of the city’s landmarks are somewhat worse for the wear — think of recent reports of troubles at the Chrysler and fears (unrealized) for the Empire State — visitors to the superblock complex would notice something else. Even amidst the Covid pandemic’s consequences for Midtown office culture and in-real-life retail, the complex is looking lively. And compared to the city’s newer mall/office offerings, it feels rather more authentically New York. Around the golden Prometheus and ice skaters in unseasonable tank tops are amenity-laden and largely occupied offices, attractive restaurants, and stores that are actually “local.” The experience might satisfy someone in the city for the first time, or at the Center for the third day this week.
Stiff competition for office workers and tourists has taken generic, grotesque, and more bizarre forms in developments across the city. The vibes at Rockefeller Center are the product of careful corporate placemaking, and a 25-year redevelopment now reaching its conclusion. Since the property developers at Tishman Speyer took over the “singular real estate asset that has transcended time,” in the words of its CEO, they have revamped the underground concourse, locked down leases from Christie’s and legal firms and curated cool-kid retailers and restaurants. Through travel bans and telework, the developers are stewarding the storied complex into a second century. We asked journalist Diana Budds and street photographer Amy Touchette to pay a visit.
Rockefeller Center was humming on a sunny Tuesday afternoon in October. A group of tourists listened attentively as their guide explained the story behind the José Maria Sert murals in the ornate lobby of 30 Rock; office workers a few floors above took in some fresh air in Radio Park, a private rooftop garden; and men in dark suits on their way to the Michelin-recommended restaurant Le Rock passed by school-aged children on a field trip and families posing for photos on the flag-lined terrace.
That these publics — professionals, tourists, design fans, students — all came to Rockefeller Center that day is in large part the conclusion to a lengthy redevelopment process. Since the international private developer Tishman Speyer bought the 9.4 million-square-foot complex for $1.85 billion dollars in 2000, the company has been steadily transforming it into a place where locals and visitors alike want to be. 25 years ago, the complex was afflicted with vacant storefronts, underwhelming restaurants, and a humiliating bankruptcy. While tourists still came for the annual Christmas tree lighting and flooded the complex during the summer months it was relatively empty for the rest of the year. Tishman Speyer — which built the new Yankee Stadium and develops commercial and residential properties — set out to make it a destination every day of the week. Today, Rockefeller Center is filled with buzzy shops and restaurants, a fleet of new amusement-park-like attractions, gallery pop-ups, and, importantly, lots of tenants.
“Our view was that if Rockefeller Center is not a place where New Yorkers are saying, I’ve got to go because there’s such an interesting art installation, such a great restaurant, such a fun concert, such an interesting thing going on — then it wasn’t going to be good for any parts of our business,” says EB Kelly, a senior managing director at Tishman Speyer and head of Rockefeller Center since 2018. “Ultimately international and domestic visitors aren’t going to want to come here because we firmly believe that visitors to New York want to have an authentic experience,” Kelly adds. “They want to go where New Yorkers are.”
Creating a space that appeals to locals and visitors is a balancing act. The New York that exists in the imagination of a tourist isn’t going to be the same as the many New Yorks 8.25 million residents know as their own. But the Tishman Speyer team and Kelly — who oversees all office and retail leasing, marketing, events, and activations at Rockefeller Center — have hit on a mixture that appeals to sightseers while keeping the offices occupied. The developer’s placemaking strategy revolves around leaning into the roots of Rockefeller Center as a glamorous, idyllic space.
When John D. Rockefeller signed on to develop what would eventually become Rockefeller Center, he thought he was building a magnificent home for the Metropolitan Opera. The Great Depression derailed this plan and so he pivoted to building a city within a city: a 22-acre complex where New Yorkers could work, shop, and catch a performance in a beautiful, walkable, art-filled setting. Rockefeller was successful. His experiment became an early example of urban renewal before urban renewal was a concept.
Rockefeller Center’s initial architects — Raymond Hood, Henry Hofmeister, and H.W. Corbett — designed the campus to be welcoming, with six-story buildings along Fifth Avenue that are more approachable than the 70-story skyscraper at the heart of the development, a garden-like promenade that slopes slightly downward to draw in pedestrians, spectacle-scale artwork that invites attention, and plenty of places to sit down and linger. Inside, the buildings are lavishly designed with carved stone, rich wood, and gilded surfaces. The magic also lies in what you don’t see: delivery trucks. Daniel Okrent, a historian of Rockefeller Center, noted in an interview with the New York Times that directing all deliveries to an underground service area is “part of what makes the place feel like an oasis.”
Through the decades, however, the development began to fade. In the 1980s, the Rockefellers sold the complex to Japanese investors. By the early ’90s, lease payments weren’t enough to cover the mortgage. Rockefeller Center went bankrupt and descended into a tourist trap. In 2000, the developers Tishman Speyer bought the complex and invested hundreds of millions of dollars into renovations.
When Tishman retooled the building, they did so with an eye toward history. Hood originally called for rooftop terraces in the blueprints, but they never made it to construction. Tishman Speyer hired the landscape architecture firm HM White to create a contemporary elevated park over Radio City Music Hall. While the plaza below is open to the public, this private space is an amenity designed to cater to tenants’ desires for outdoor open space.
The distinct architecture has become a selling point for workplace tenants. While 30 Rockefeller Center is classified as Class-A office space, renting for the highest rates per square foot, its layout and materiality is quite different from buildings with wide open, column-free floor plans and lots of windows, like what’s on offer in Hudson Yards or at the World Trade Center. “It’s mass versus glass,” Kelly says. However, she’s found that many businesses — law firms and financial services companies, in particular — are drawn to Rockefeller Center’s architectural character: think exposed masonry, loads of natural materials, and operable windows.
“I cannot compete if your number one top priority is floor-to-ceiling glass, tallest possible building, highest possible ceiling heights; I don’t have that,” Kelly says. “But if you’re looking for a place that has character immediately, that has lobbies that are spectacular? I hear over and over again [from tenants] about the warmth that’s in the built environment and in the atmosphere.”
Keeping the atmosphere consistent is part of the complex’s transformation. The changes may be most visible on the rink level of the complex. The sunken pit was never a successful part of the design — visitors rarely went down there when it first opened, which is part of the reason the ice skating went in in 1936. Because foot traffic to the storefronts there remained low, Tishman Speyer enlisted INC Architecture & Design to redesign the level.
As a child, Adam Rolston, a partner at INC, would visit Rockefeller Center with his father. “We all have this super attachment to it,” Rolston says. “It’s the town square of the city in some ways.” In his perspective, the mixture of art and architecture makes the complex distinct, and he wanted to remain faithful to the ideas in the original design.
“When we got the commission, the developers had already gone through a round with another architect, and it was this white airport looking thing, completely alien to the context,” Rolston says.
Tishman Speyer’s brief was “to democratize the rink,” Rolston says, so INC brought some of the town square feeling downstairs. They reoriented the circulation with a glass-walled promenade around the perimeter, turning the underground space into a viewing gallery for the rink. Before, restaurants were adjacent to the wall, which was great if you had a table by the window, but not for anyone else.
Much of the work revolved around making the level feel less like a dark maze, while respecting the original architecture. For example, the shape of the new skylights along the concourse references the geometry of the reflecting pool upon which the famous gold statue of Prometheus sits. Meanwhile, the wall sconces riff on radiators found in the Radio City dressing rooms.
The symbolism of the architecture also influenced how Kelly and her team conceived of new attractions. They updated the Top of the Rock observation deck — which now has competition from the Summit at One Vanderbilt, the Edge at Hudson Yards, and One World Observatory — to include new features more akin to amusement park rides. The Skylift is a telescoping platform that ascends 30 feet higher than the roof for an unobstructed 360-degree view of the cityscape, while The Beam lets visitors recreate the famous 1932 photograph of Rockefeller Center construction workers having lunch on an I-beam.
The historical references helped Tishman Speyer’s changes receive approval from the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. “Our relationship with the LPC is obviously super important,” Kelly says. “Before we began the whole redevelopment — even before we sort of had anything more than probably schematic design drawings — we went to them and said, ‘Here’s the full range of things we’re thinking about.’ We showed them some pretty crazy ideas for Top of the Rock. Ultimately what we built was Skylift and the Beam.”
Where Tishman Speyer didn’t look to the past was restaurants. Kelly and her team recruited celebrity chefs and restaurant groups behind buzzy downtown and Brooklyn establishments. Tishman Speyer offered them lower rents and helped with building out their spaces in order to get them to Midtown.
Taking the place of operators that had been around since the 1980s are 5 Acres by Greg Baxtrom, who runs a mini empire of restaurants in Prospect Heights that includes the Michelin-recommended Olmsted; Jupiter, by the same people behind the SoHo restaurant King; and Other Half Brewing, a craft brewer founded in Red Hook. If you can’t afford the $140 steak and fries from Lodi, a restaurant on the plaza level from the star chef Ignacio Mattos, there are $6 tacos on the plaza outside and $10 personal pizzas in the concourse underground. These establishments led the New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells to call Rockefeller Center’s transformation “the miracle off 49th Street” in a glowing review of the new food scene there.
Retail saw a similar refresh. Over the years, shops along the Channel Gardens and plaza had skewed toward mid-tier mass brands. Kelly and her team invited smaller, locally owned boutiques to join the mix. The jewelry brand Catbird has a storefront on 49th Street, in between Kate Spade and Michael Kors. Founded in 2004, the brand earned a cult following among stylish Brooklynites for its delicate gold rings. In the 20 years since, it’s expanded nationally from Williamsburg. They opened a space in Rockefeller Center last year partly to bring more awareness to the brand.
In 2021, the record emporium Rough Trade closed its Williamsburg storefront and moved to Rockefeller Center. While their space is just 2,000 square feet, down from 15,000 in Brooklyn, their sales are higher. Stephen Godfroy, the store’s co-owner, credits this to more people passing by. “Our store patron profile is as broad as it is long — all ages, tastes, and ethnicities,” he says. “In Williamsburg, we frustratingly found ourselves suffocating in the rarified air of being in a ‘brunch bubble.’”
While it’s difficult to compare Rockefeller Center to other developments in New York, it’s faring better than the Midtown real estate market, with 93 percent of the complex leased while the neighborhood’s overall vacancy rate is hovering around 22 percent. All commercial leasing in the city is still finding its footing post Covid-19. The Chrysler Building, about ten blocks southeast of Rockefeller Center and built around the same time and in the same Art Deco style, is deteriorating and now nearly half vacant. It’s an example of how a trophy address and distinguished design aren’t enough to stay relevant; actively managing the day-to-day mix is key.
As employers implement return to office plans and the number of pedestrians in the city nears pre-pandemic levels, foot traffic is “going in the right direction more and more,” Kelly says. In fact, the area around Rockefeller Center is so consistently busy that the city is considering pedestrianizing Fifth Avenue, from Bryant Park all the way north to Central Park.
“The prospect of more pedestrian space, the increased public realm, can be really exciting,” Kelly says. “The piece that needs to be underscored is that it has to be really actively managed. One of the challenges and complaints that we hear is around issues of costumed characters, vendors, food, and that can get pretty dicey. That’s not the kind of public realm that you want to have all around Rock Center, not what you want to have up and down Fifth Avenue.”
What Kelly’s comment gets at is that no one wants to be accosted by a surly Elmo and no tourists want to get stuck in a tourist trap. But it also shows how the day-to-day realities — what could also be described as authenticity — of the city just outside of the boundaries of Rockefeller Center diverge from the upscale utopia that Tishman Speyer has so carefully created.
“Two nights earlier I walked through Times Square,” Kelly says. “I think for many visitors, that’s a pretty dehumanizing experience, frankly. What we can deliver at Rock Center is great food in a beautiful place. That’s a really special part of this.”
All photos copyright Amy Touchette.
