Rockefeller Center Facade, Midtown Manhattan, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Rockefeller Center Facade, Midtown Manhattan, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Rockefeller Center Facade, Midtown Manhattan, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-6E756C

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Someone stood on a midtown Manhattan sidewalk in the 1950s, tipped a camera straight up, and captured the full bureaucratic ambition of Rockefeller Center's limestone cliff face — hundreds of identical windows marching upward in such perfect repetition that the building appears to have been designed by someone who ran out of ideas on the second floor and simply kept going for sixty more. The Art Deco setbacks at the base, with their vertical limestone piers, were meant to signal that commerce, at sufficient altitude, becomes something like civic grandeur. Inside each of those windows, at almost any hour of the working day, a man in a suit was doing something that felt urgent enough to justify the rent. The building was already two decades old when this was taken, which meant the postwar economy was busy proving that the Rockefellers had been right to build it — a fact the building acknowledged by simply standing there, indifferent to validation.

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