Follow the line of flags in toward the tall building at the end of the promenade. Eight floors up inside it is a room that has been going out live to the entire country since before the Second World War, and it has never once done the job it was built to do.
The whole complex went up in the worst years of the Depression, which is the only reason it looks like this. Rockefeller was locked into a lease he couldn't escape after his original plan collapsed, so he built anyway, and tens of thousands of men got work at the exact moment there was no work anywhere. The building is a monument to a man who couldn't get out of a contract.
You've almost certainly seen the most famous photograph taken during construction. Eleven ironworkers sitting on a steel beam, eating lunch, eight hundred and fifty feet up, no harnesses, one of them lighting a cigarette. It is the defining image of American labor and it was an advertisement. The publicity department staged it, along with a whole series of sho
ts, to sell office space in this building. The men were genuinely up there and the height is genuinely real, but somebody arranged them like a window display. Nobody knows for certain which photographer took it. Three of them were on site that day and the credit was never nailed down.
Now go back to that room on the eighth floor. Studio Eight H. When they cut it out of the building, it was the la
