STATES & CITIES: First Avenue, New York

Appropriately, the deal was signed in a nightclub. U.N. delegates would get a glittering skyscraper headquarters along the East River. New York would get U.N.’s prestige and cash. And no one was happier about it all than a jet-propelled real-estate tycoon named William Zeckendorf. He had planned it that way.

A big, paunchy idea man who likes flamboyant ties and flamboyant schemes, Bill Zeckendorf had cornered a section of grimy tenements, abattoirs and garages on Manhattan’s East Side. He had planned to demolish them, raise in their place a dream city of Euclidean skyscraper hotels and office buildings (TIME, Oct. 14). But a fortnight ago he approached New York’s William O’Dwyer with the idea of selling the whole caboodle to U.N. instead.

Mayor O’Dwyer, who desperately wanted to keep U.N. in New York, hurriedly got in touch with a potent member of his U.N. site committee, young Nelson Rockefeller, just in by plane from Mexico. Nelson immediately got in touch with his dad, John D. Jr. John D. got out his checkbook.

“How Much?” One night last week Manhattan Architect Wallace Harrison, who had helped build Rockefeller Center for the Rockefellers, walked into Manhattan’s jangling, spangly Monte Carlo where Bill Zeckendorf was just beginning to enjoy himself. It was his sixth wedding anniversary, his partner’s 34th birthday. Architect Harrison had a map of Manhattan in his hand. Ringing Zeckendorf’s East Side site with a pencil, he asked: “How much?” Without batting an eye, Zeckendorf tossed off his answer: $8,500,000. Forthwith, a 30-day option in the name of John D. Rockefeller Jr. was signed.

One hour later John D. had finished a letter to the U.N., offering the property as a gift. The conditions: that New York City buy up and give to U.N. the few lots needed to square off the site; that the city turn over the streets included in the area, and rights to the waterfront.

New York City’s Board of Estimate immediately agreed to do its part. A sub-committee of the U.N. made a whirlwind inspection of the site, turned in a glowing report. At week’s end the General Assembly voted (46 to 7) to accept the Rockefeller gift. U.N. had found a home.

Promoter Zeckendorf had let his U.N. site go for a 20% profit, he said. Now he was busily buying up East Side property as far west of U.N. as Grand Central, getting ready to refurbish the whole area. When he sells or develops his neighboring blocks, he expects to make his usual 400% profit. Said he with happy anticipation: “That’s how we make progress in this wonderful capitalistic country.”

The Judas Sheep. There had been little enough progress in the area where U.N. would build: between 42nd and 48th Streets, from First Avenue to the river (see map). In the old slaughterhouse area livestock is still floated in by barge from New Jersey, is still led to the killing sheds by a cynical Judas sheep. On a vacant lot near the Consolidated laundry, Italian workmen still bowl through the intricacies of bocce every day the weather permits. Sidewalks are littered with old refuse, crumbling walls chalked with ancient obscenities.

But U.N. would be an inevitable part of a larger area: the cosmopolitan jumble of the midtown East Side. Like most Manhattan neighborhoods, this is a bewildering contradiction of new & old, rich & poor, strange & familiar.

Two blocks north of U.N. and one block from the constant rumble of First Avenue trucks is Manhattan’s swank, placid Beekman Place, rimming a bluff over the East River, with a view from Brooklyn to The Bronx. John D. Rockefeller III has an apartment at No. 1. A block away lives Columnist-Entrepreneur Billy Rose, with his wife, Eleanor Holm, Actress Katherine Cornell lives at No. 23.

At the foot of 52nd Street, where the Dead End Kids of Sidney Kingsley’s play once hung out, is the palatial River House (duplexes and triplexes at $4,500 to $12,000). Among the well-heeled tenants: Atlas Corp.’s Floyd Odium and his wife, Jacqueline Cochran; newswriter and lecturer Quentin Reynolds. On nearby Sutton Place lives Heiress Anne Morgan.

Under the El. But the streets to the west of this riverside grandeur are lined with dirty brownstones, tiny groceries, laundries, swap shops and antique stores. Along Third Avenue, blacked out and shaken by the thundering El, Irish bars and French bistros alternate with English and Swedish restaurants. Most famed: P. J. (“Paddy”) Clarke’s saloon at 55th Street, enlivened by the stuffed figure of the original four-legged Paddy, who used to deliver buckets of beer to regular patrons; Tim Costello’s, jampacked with newspapermen, its walls decorated with original Thurber drawings; the fabulously expensive Chambord (pompano and pheasant, $15 & up).

The area has its own history of brutality and violence. Near the foot of 46th Street, Nathan Hale was executed in 1776. In more recent years there have been less heroic deaths: the Veronica Gedeon murder, the Titterton and Lonergan killings.

“Better World.” Just how U.N.’s Rockefeller Center-style quarters would fit into the hodgepodge of midtown New York would depend on U.N.’s Trygve Lie, charged by the Assembly with preparing an estimate of costs and requirements. An international competition for architects would probably be held. Whatever the shape and form, Manhattan’s East Side was in for a face-lifting.

The decision produced mixed emotions. Cried the Times: “From its topmost towers we will survey the River of Time flowing toward a better world.” San Francisco’s Mayor Roger Lapham still thought his city “would be a better place.” But in New York, almost everyone seemed pleased about it. Wealthy U.N. neighbors-to-be foresaw sky-rocketing real-estate investments. Elimination of the slaughterhouses would remove some of the soot which now makes the district the city’s dirtiest. Storekeepers were bound to profit.

Even the dispossessed were resignedly cheerful. Said one: “It’s all right with us. But I don’t see what a big organization like U.N. wants to come to First Avenue for.”