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It will always be the RCA Building to some. Other people believe it’s still the GE Building, while others are coming to terms with what, this month, was renamed the Comcast Building. Most of the world knows it as 30 Rock.
But by any name, 30 Rockefeller Plaza remains what it’s always been and seems even more so today:
Simply, the greatest building in the world.
I’ve itched to write that sentence for years. No skyscraper in New York, or anywhere, so fully realizes as does 30 Rock the urban ideal of an architecturally magnificent, poly-functional edifice serving commerce, art and recreation equally.
But I had no excuse to bring it up until now, when a Comcast sign replaced GE’s, which had adorned the Art Deco tower’s 70th floor since 1988.
News reports — even Bloomberg, which ought to know something about real estate — identified Comcast as the building’s owner. In fact, 30 Rock’s landlord, since the mid-1990s, is Tishman Speyer. Comcast owns all of NBC Universal, but only about one-third of 30 Rock — a commercial condominium inside the 2.5-million-square-foot tower.
The error was less annoying than the insufficient public adoration for 30 Rock.
Sure, millions admire it as a backdrop to the Christmas tree, home of the Rainbow Room or setting of the rollicking Alec Baldwin/Tina Fey sitcom. For all that — and its fame as home to “Saturday Night Live” and “The Tonight Show” — the building itself draws nothing like the oohing and aahing over the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, or perhaps even new One World Trade Center.
Yet no other landmark can equal its emblematic reflection of New York as the empire city. With its iconic location overlooking the Channel Gardens, 30 Rock is not merely the throbbing heartbeat of Rockefeller Center, but of all Midtown.
At 30 Rock, it’s not as if time stood still since the 1950s, when it first awed me as a child — it’s as if 1950s Midtown were truly as romantic as they were made to seem in movies like “My Favorite Year.”
30 Rock uniquely serves as a vertical town square for all the good things which draw the world to Manhattan. The marble lobby, with entrances on four sides and wrapped on its east end by Josep Maria Sert’s soaring murals, is as welcoming to TV stars, lawyers and brokers heading upstairs as it is to employees of fast-food shops in the underground concourse.
Many entertainment and financial firms abandoned East Midtown for locations south and west, but 30 Rock never got the memo. Here dwell NBC (since 1933!), Wall Street’s Lazard and Deloitte, law firms Baker Botts and Haynes & Boone, the 65th-floor Rainbow Room, SixtyFive lounge, and open-air Top of the Rock, the city’s best observatory.
They share the Art Deco splendor with the best shoeshine spot in town, Eddie’s, among scores of humble shops and services in the concourse.
30 Rock’s top-to-bottom beauty laughs at the Empire State Building, which is unremarkable below its colorfully lit crown. It is immeasurably friendlier than the Chrysler Building, which apart from its sexy spire is an office address with few public amenities.
30 Rock reads as a thin pencil viewed from east or west, a limestone palisade from north or south. Its roof is flat, not sharp-pointed. But it needs no needle to find heaven. Cunningly spaced setbacks crescendo skyward like the cathedral-of-sound, first movement of Brahms’ Fourth Symphony.
The tower owes its enduring greatness to three sets of visionaries — the Rockefeller family, which erected a mighty urban complex in the depth of the Great Depression; its architects, led by Raymond Hood; and Tishman Speyer, which rescued it from years of neglect and made it better than when it first enchanted me as a child.
But one ghostly vestige remains of the long-ago: Just inside the Sixth Avenue entrance, at an elevator bank for office-goers, hangs a felt directory board of the kind once used to guide visitors. It was stripped of its tenant list perhaps in the 1980s. But a few letters stubbornly cling to the black background. They say “RCA Building.”