Art: Radio City

Caviar canapés, cold boiled lobsters, chickens in aspic and other unaccustomed objects covered the draughting tables in the offices of Reinhard & Hofmeister last week. Earnestly munching, architects, reporters, engineers, radio tycoons and photographers stood round a central table on which a 5-ft. plasterboard model slowly revolved—the model for the greatest private architectural project ever undertaken in the U. S., New York’s $250,000,000 Radio City (TIME, July 7).

The project started nearly two years ago when the Rockefeller estate assembled three full blocks in mid-Manhattan (48th to 51st Streets, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues) as a monumental site for the Metropolitan Opera. But the Opera balked. The Rockefeller estate was left with a temporarily useless tract of land. Architects and engineers, who had been licking their chops at the thought of the juiciest contracts in generations, turned glum.

One who did not give up hope was lean, grey-haired John Reynard Todd of the engineering firm of Todd Robertson Todd.* In New York his firm is responsible for the much admired Graybar and Cunard buildings. John Reynard Todd is a great & good friend of John Davison Rockefeller Jr. A qualified lawyer, he is an able pleader. Last May he had many interviews with Mr. Rockefeller, with Merlin Hall Aylesworth, president of National Broadcasting Co. and with officials of Radio Corp. of America and Radio-Keith-Orpheum. In June it was announced that the great project would go forward, not as an opera but as a radio centre, something to serve not only New York but the entire U. S. Here would be the offices and broadcasting studios of NBC, RCA, RKO; a huge vaudeville theatre, a huge picture theatre, additional buildings for banks, shops, restaurants, offices. At John Reynard Todd’s suggestion, three firms of architects were appointed to work with him: Reinhard & Hofmeister; Corbett, Harrison & MacMurray; Raymond Hood, Godley & Fouilhoux.

Press agents named the grand scheme Radio City. Then came the question of a figurehead to attract public attention, as Alfred Emanuel Smith was figureheading the Empire State Building. It was announced last week that Samuel Lionel (“Roxy”) Rothafel would be inaugurated “Mayor” of Radio City on April 1.

Art critics had an immediate reason for hurrying to inspect the model and renderings exhibited last week. Two of the three architects of Radio City—Raymond Mathewson Hood and Harvey Wiley Corbett—are also architects of the much publicized 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Fortnight ago at a meeting to protest the exclusion of the modernist pioneer Frank Lloyd Wright from the commission of Fair architects (TIME, March 9) the Fair designs of Architects Hood & Corbett were bitterly attacked as “fake modernism,” “eclectic shams,” “a pretty cardboard picture of ancient wall masses.”

The Fair is a temporary civic project to serve and benefit the city of Chicago. Radio City is a permanent private enterprise with a national ambition. The Fair will cost $60,000,000. Radio City will cost more than four times as much, and must last at least 50 years (average life of a New York skyscraper is 20 years). Whether the credit belongs to the architects or to Engineers Todd & Robertson, critics inspecting the model of Radio City were surprised to see how closely it follows the principles of “Organic Architecture” so frequently preached by Frank Lloyd Wright and his disciples. Radio City will definitely not be just a “pretty picture.”

The Fifth Avenue front of the entire block is taken up by a graceful, perfectly oval 14-story building. It will contain ladies’ shops, a banking floor, showrooms, a roof garden restaurant. Directly behind it the bleak, jagged slab of a 68-story tower shoots 675 ft. up into the air. Unadorned with radiator caps, Renaissance lanterns or mooring masts, it will be lower than either the Chrysler or Empire State buildings, will contain more useful space than either. Here will be the radio offices, 27 studios for broadcasting and television (which radio officials confidently expect to be commercially practicable before the building is completed in 1933*). Flanking it are 4,000 and 6,500-seat theatres, one for pictures, one for vaudeville (several of the studios in the tower may be turned into additional “intimate” theatres) ; and greatly to the surprise of last week’s reporters, there is completely planned but not yet under contract a building for the Metropolitan Opera. In the centre of the development is an open plaza, to north and south are identical 45-story office buildings. Because of the mass of theatrical traffic, it was originally planned that the entire subterrain of the development would be used for parking space. At least one parking plot will be built, but because of ventilation problems and fire hazard, one of the unclassified buildings may be converted into a parking tower.

Collegiate Church & Tailored Woman. Such symmetry as the plan of Radio City has is marred by three excrescences. Planned for the front of the 50-51st Street block is a nine-story department store building. A Fifth Avenue dress shop known as The Tailored Woman has an eight-year lease which Radio City refuses to buy up. The Radio City building will be built around The Tailored Woman, ready to engulf it soon as the lease expires. The home of Robert Goelet was on the 49th St. corner. He could sell to the Rockefellers, but tore his house down to put up a modernistic office building on the site. He has agreed to build in keeping with the general scheme. Still undecided are the color and type of materials for the sheathing of Radio City. Mr. Goelet tried to make up Radio City’s mind by building his building of green marble and white brick.

Stubbornly resisting all efforts at dislodgment is the brownstone mid-Victorian Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas. On the central peak of this church’s façade is a curious coffin-shaped slab of brown stone. For years drivers of sightseeing buses have trumpeted to visitors the legend that the slab is a coffin, that it contains the remains of the donor of the church who had a mortal fear of worms. Actually the slab is merely an ornament. The Collegiate Church was built by no individual but by the Collegiate Corporation, in 1869.

Excavation for Radio City will start June 15.

* The second Todd of Todd Robertson Todd is James Todd, John Reynard’s brother. John Reynard’s tall Princetonian son Webster conducts, in close affiliation with his father’s firm, the architectural-engineering partnership of Todd & Brown.

* Vol. 1, No. 1 of the first television magazine appeared on newsstands last week. Edited and published by Hugo Gernsback, its title is Television News, 50c the copy.