ROCKEFELLER CENTER, Introduction

Hi, my name’s Rick, and I’m your personal guide. Along with MyWoWo, I’d like to welcome you to one of the Wonders of the World.

Today I’ll be accompanying you on your visit to the Rockefeller Center and its surroundings.

The Rockefeller Center is one of the most renowned financial and business complexes in the world, a bricks-and-mortar example of the realization of the great American dream.

The Center is named after a famous family of US industrialists, headed by John Davison Rockefeller, an oil tycoon and generous philanthropist. Towards the end of the 1920s, Rockefeller decided to invest part of his huge fortune in real estate projects, and among the various areas available in the city, he chose a piece of land belonging to Columbia University, in Midtown. His idea was to create an actual “city within the city” that would be able to compete, in terms of volume of business, with Wall Street. Unfortunately, the multi-millionaire’s untimely death prevented him from seeing his glittering dream come true, and his son remained the sole financial backer of the project: in spite of the galloping advance of the Great Depression, he continued with the building work, which lasted ten years until its completion in 1939....