NEW YORK: Monument

A modern Kubla Khan, John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1930 a cluster of skyscrapers decreed. Never had such a cluster been decreed before. Between elegant Fifth Avenue and shoddy Sixth in the next nine years, 14 slab-sided tombstones uprose. Last week, wearing a pair of workman’s white gloves, Mr. Rockefeller drove a silver rivet into the 14th and final building, to symbolize the completion of his $100,000,000 monument.

Back in its beginnings, a wit had cracked: “The only thing Rockefeller Center will be used for is a bird sanctuary.”

Dominating the neighborhood, the Center has drawn in tenants like a sponge, emptied offices in many another building. Rented was 85% of 5,114,000 square feet of floor space, its two miles of shop frontage. Sixteen hundred companies and their subsidiaries, 25,000 people, lived their business and professional lives there. One hundred and ninety-one elevators, some of them moving at the rate of 1,400 feet a minute, sped this population up & down.

Through the Center in the past nine months (to attend seven features alone) have traipsed 8,200,300 visitors, roundly enough to populate London, Paris and Manhattan.

Wonders at which they gasped:

>The 70-story RCA Building, largest office building in the world, the headstone of the group; the 50-mile view from its roof; 30,000 square feet of roof area on its eleventh floor; National Broadcasting Co.’s 35 radio and television studios, in which 20,000,000 cubic feet of air circulate every hour; its transparent woman with the illuminated organs.

> A 16-story, 800-car garage.

> Radio City Music Hall, where nightly, daily danced the robotesque Rockettes on the best-trained row of legs in the world.

>The eleven other buildings, one of which contained within its vastness three full-size model homes; another, TIME.

Without stepping off the twelve acres of the Center a visitor could go to dentist, doctor, chiropodist, osteopath, could have a massage, exercise in a gymnasium, study languages, book passage to Tahiti, get a passport, could dine, drink and dance. Only comfort and convenience not to be found there was a place to sleep.

Only bird sanctuary was a bird shop in the RCA Building’s cellar. As he drove the silver rivet, Mr. Rockefeller beamed.