A couple of weeks ago on twitter via @NewYorkology (a great website/blog for all things NYC) I learned that there is an architectual/art history tour of Rockefeller Center. I’m always looking for new experiences in New York so I mentioned it to Jon and we signed up for a one hour tour which we took on March 20th. Rockefeller Center is somewhere that EVERYONE, resident of NYC or not, has visited. It was really neat to get a behind the scenes tour describing the history of this iconic NYC locale, the art that is all over Rockefeller Center that I had never noticed until I took this tour, the meaning behind the art and just really exploring this area in a totally different way.
Above is just a sampling of the amazing art that’s just on the buildings in Rockefeller Center if you take the time to slow down and look. The art around Rockefeller Center is a mix of modern art, art deco and classical greek styled art. There are murals, mosaics, carvings, sculpture – a little bit of everything.
The sculpture on this building was John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s least favorite. They flanked the North and South entrances to the RCA building. He disliked them so much that he refused to enter the building through those entrances. So he worked in the RCA building everyday after Rockefeller Center was completed and never entered through these entrances. While done in a classical greek style they are supposed to represent television. I thought it was a stretch, but maybe I just don’t have a good enough imagination.
One thing I didn’t know about Rockefeller Center was that it, like the Empire State Building, was built during the recession. That famed photograph of the men sitting on the iron beam out over the top of NYC, that was during the building of Top of the Rock! I never knew that.
One of the most interesting things we learned on the tour had to do with the Atlas sculpture, a sculpture that everyone has walked by countless times. If you look at Atlas from the front, he seems agressive, his face is set, his arms are out wide holding the weight of the earth and he is lunging towards the street.
Yet as our tour guide explained, if you look at the sculpture from behind facing St. Patrick’s Cathedral, his head is bowed and he appears to be kneeling in reverence. It was incredibly impressive to see the difference between looking at the sculpture from one direction vs. the other.
These are just some of the things we learned while on the tour, there is tons more that I didn’t mention. Our tour guide spoke a lot about the history of each building, who/what they were built for, the history of the Rockefeller’s, how Rockefeller bought up the land and what difficulties he encountered, that it was the first large planned real estate project, what’s changed and what has stayed the same, the art that was removed because of it’s implications, why Rock Center was built the way it was built,etc. Our tour guide was incredibly informative, and very accessible if that’s the right way to put it. He didn’t have airs and was very real as he took us around. I enjoyed looking at the history and art of Rock Center, it made me appreciate this tourist destination in a different way.
The tour was just one hour long and $15. It was the perfect amount of time and I didn’t feel that the cost was unreasonable. You have to reserve the tour through the Marketing Department of Top of the Rock or there might be a way through the website. I would highly recommend this tour, it was one of our favorite things we’ve done in NYC!
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Have you been to Rockefeller Center? Do you like going there?
