Fireplace Remodeling in Rockefeller Center, NY

The first private owner of the site was physician David Hosack, who purchased twenty acres of rural land from New York City in 1801 and opened the country’s first botanical garden, the Elgin Botanic Garden, on the site. The gardens operated until 1811, and by 1823 the property was under the ownership of Columbia University. Columbia moved its main campus north to Morningside Heights, in Upper Manhattan, by the turn of the century.

In 1926, the Metropolitan Opera started looking for locations for a new opera house to replace the existing building at 39th Street and Broadway. By 1928, Benjamin Wistar Morris and designer Joseph Urban were hired to come up with blueprints for the house. However, the new building was too expensive for the Met to fund by itself, and John D. Rockefeller Jr. eventually gave his support to the project (John D. Rockefeller Sr., his father, was not involved). Rockefeller hired Todd, Robertson and Todd as design consultants to determine its viability. John R. Todd then put forth a plan for the Met. Columbia leased the plot to Rockefeller for 87 years at a cost of $3 million per year, excluding some properties on Fifth Avenue and a strip on Sixth Avenue. The initial cost of acquiring the space, razing some of the existing buildings, and constructing new buildings was estimated at $250 million.

Rockefeller hired Corbett, Harrison & MacMurray; Hood, Godley & Fouilhoux; and Reinhard & Hofmeister, to design the buildings. They worked under the umbrella of “Associated Architects” so none of the buildings could be attributed to any specific firm. The principal builder and “managing agent” was John R. Todd, one of the co-founders of Todd, Robertson and Todd. The principal architect and leader of the Associated Architects was Raymond Hood, a student of the Art Deco architectural movement. The other architects included Harvey Wiley Corbett and Wallace Harrison. L. Andrew Reinhard and Henry Hofmeister had been hired by John Todd as the “rental architects”, who designed the floor plans for the complex. The Metropolitan Square Corporation (the precursor to Rockefeller Center Inc.) was formed in December 1928 to oversee construction.