Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

A NOTE TO THE READERPlaces: I wish the names of buildings were as simple as, say, designing, erecting, and occupying a group of remarkable structures in the heart of America’s largest city in the middle of the Great Depression. In most instances my proper nouns are the ones in use during the periods I’m writing about. Therefore, at different points in this book different names are used to describe one thing: Metropolitan Square, Radio City, Rockefeller City, Rockefeller Center; looking back from today, it’s always Rockefeller Center. For individual buildings I’ve generally used the names they were known by when built—thus, the building now called 1270 Avenue of the Americas is referred to here as the RKO Building; the Time & Life Building I refer to is the original version, south of the skating rink, and not the current one on Sixth Avenue. (The illustration on pages viii–ix should clarify any nomenclatural murkiness.) By “Rockefeller Center” itself, I mean those buildings completed before World War II. The two later buildings in the original style (Sinclair and Esso) and all those across Sixth Avenue, from 46th Street to 51st Street, are formally part of Rockefeller Center, but not of the concept that became Rockefeller Center. Numbers: Dates of buildings vary by source—some authorities use the date when construction begins, some the date when it ends. When in doubt, I’ve gone with the dates provided by Norval White and Elliot Willensky in their indispensable AIA Guide to New York City. The height of buildings, in feet as well as in stories, is often the concoction of developers and their publicists, who like to count rooftop air vents, water tanks, radio antennae, and anything else that can stretch the “official” number. I’ve generally allowed them their fun, except where it’s material, as in the case of the sixty-six- (or maybe sixty-seven-, but not remotely seventy-) story RCA Building. Same with quantity of buildings: Rockefeller Center management has always counted the six-story eastern appendages of the International Building as separate structures, but the whole thing is clearly one building, and I count it as such.People: The only nomenclatural issue here has to do with the family at the book’s heart, the Rockefellers. The three men bearing the name John Davison Rockefeller are here referred to in two instances by the names by which they are known to the family archivists—Senior and Junior. The third, depending on context, is either Johnny or John.Some readers may think a more material issue concerning people has to do with gender: save for a very few lesser characters, this saga has an all-male cast. This is a reflection of the era, and not of any authorial bias.Finally, a comment on memory: Interviews are great for color and for a sense of personality. But even those conducted much closer to the events described here—those compiled by the Columbia University Oral History Project, for instance, or by the excellent architectural historian Carol Herselle Krinsky—are flawed by that most unreliable of research tools, memory. Contemporary documents, however, are precise. When I’ve encountered a conflict of facts, either I point it out in context or go with the one that seems to me, after six years’ immersion in this project, to be accurate. In a jump ball, the document almost always wins.—D. O.New York, March 2003PROLOGUEMAY 21, 1928All the men entering the gleaming marble hall of the Metropolitan Club had arrived at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street on the wings of their wealth. The guest list was a roll call of New York’s richest: corporate titans Marshall Field, Clarence Mackay, and Walter P. Chrysler; Wall Street operators Jules S. Bache, Bernard Baruch, and Thomas Lamont; various Lehmans and Whitneys, Guggenheims and Warburgs, men whose very surnames provided all the definition they needed. Financier Otto Kahn was there, for Otto Kahn was ubiquitous in New York if opera was on the agenda, as it was on this balmy night. But an interest in Verdi or Wagner was not the primary qualifier for inclusion on the invitation list. According to a young architect named Robert O’Connor, whose father-in-law was scheduled to be the featured speaker, the evening’s host had simply invited everyone he knew who had more than ten million dollars.Not all of them belonged to the Metropolitan Club, but there was no better venue for a convocation of the New York plutocracy. J. P. Morgan had founded the Metropolitan in 1891, after his friend John King, president of the Erie Railroad, was blackballed by the Union Club (Morgan said it was an act of spite; others insisted that certain members were offended by King’s dreadful table manners). Morgan’s stature had guaranteed a membership distinguished not solely by heredity or by financial success but by an unprecedented confluence of both. By 1928 the Metropolitan membership included two Vanderbilts, three Mellons, five Du Ponts, and six Roosevelts. It also included three men who were parties of interest to the evening’s proceedings. One was the host, an aristocrat named R. Fulton Cutting, known to some as “the first citizen of New York.” Another was Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University and a member of the Metropolitan’s board of governors, who knew that the future of his institution was to a large degree dependent on the evening’s outcome. The third was Ivy Ledbetter Lee, a preacher’s son from Georgia representing the man who, even in his absence, was the lead player in the evening’s drama.No one expected John D. Rockefeller Jr. to attend the meeting at the Metropolitan Club that Monday night, and he didn’t disappoint. He wasn’t much of a clubman, generally preferring to spend his evenings at home in his nine-story mansion on West 54th Street; just the night before, he and his wife, Abby, had welcomed to a typical “family supper” another Ivy Lee client, Colonel Charles Lindbergh—“a simple, unostentatious, cleancut, charming fellow,” Rockefeller wrote. Rockefeller usually sought to insulate himself from the endless entreaties for access to the family treasury, and the Metropolitan Club event was clearly in that category. He got a lot of invitations of this kind, and almost always chose to deputize one of his associates to serve as a sort of scout.Oddly, in this instance the scout—Lee—was collaborating with the supplicants. Odder still was the shadow play that was the evening’s presentation, offered ostensibly for the benefit of the assembled guests but mostly for the man who wasn’t there. The speaker was Benjamin Wistar Morris, an architect of middling accomplishment but excellent breeding. On this particular evening Morris was working for the board of the Metropolitan Opera Real Estate Company (R. Fulton Cutting, president), a group of men whose money was substantial, very old, and dearly husbanded. The elaborate clay model of an opera house and other buildings on the table in front of Morris; his impressive stereopticon slides; his reasoned, detailed, and admirably practical speech—how could anyone not be convinced of the enormous civic virtue that would arise from the development of a small plot of land in the center of a slummy midtown block?Morris’s plan, Lee later reported to Rockefeller, would leave most of this land a plaza for the benefit of the public. “The Opera Company itself is able to finance the building of [a] new structure,” he added. Wasn’t it, Lee suggested, worth putting up the $2.5 million necessary to acquire this land from Columbia University, its improbable owner, so New York could finally have a new opera house?SEPTEMBER 30, 1939This time Rockefeller showed up. Seated in the front of a large gymnasium on the fourth floor of a new sixteen-story office building, he waited for his thirty-one-year-old son, Nelson, to finish the introductions. The audience this time consisted of some two thousand carpenters, charwomen, elevator operators, violinists, bookkeepers, rental agents, skating coaches, and widely assorted others on the Rockefeller payroll. One of those in attendance said that Nelson’s natural charm, amplified by his boundless energy, “gave the meeting something of a feeling of a college rally of students and faculty a night or two before the big game.”His father would not sustain the pep rally; it wasn’t his way. He was a constitutionally shy man, and on those occasions when he was compelled to speak in public he was far more likely to adopt the mien of the Bible-school teacher he had long been than to attempt to become a cheerleader. Facing the crowd that had been lifted so high by his buoyant son, Rockefeller chose to give a history lesson. Eleven years earlier, he said, “I was asked to join with others in acquiring [a] plot to be given to the city for a street and public square, in order to provide an adequate setting for the opera house.” But, he continued, “the opera people withdrew entirely from the undertaking—an undertaking which they themselves had initiated and which I had become interested in solely at their instance.” As a result, he went on to explain, things didn’t turn out exactly as he had thought they would.CHAPTER ONEThe Heart of This Great City Is Now Settled for All Time. It is the district from 34th to 59th Sts., 3rd to 10th Avenues.—real estate record and builders’ guide, 1920In an era when nearly every college president bore a triple- barreled name, none carried as potent a charge as Nicholas Murray Butler. To his intimates the president of Columbia University was “Murray”; to the associates who saw him found the school’s Teachers College in 1887 at the age of twenty- five he was “Nicholas Miraculous.” His employees simply called him President (when they didn’t refer to him as “Czar Nicholas”), his acquaintances, Doctor. The editors of Life named him “one of the most erudite men of his time.” None of this necessarily contradicted Senator Robert M. La Follette, who said Butler was a “bootlicker of men of fortune.” Theodore Roosevelt was even blunter: he considered him “an aggressive and violent ass.”It was inevitable that a man so comfortable within the embrace of the American patriciate would provoke such epithets. He had built a career, a reputation, and an unblemished belief in his own virtue upon a nearly holy devotion to the marriage of money and power. Wherever Butler traveled, his focus italicized by the vivid smear of his luxuriant eyebrows, he looked benevolently upon the deeds, and the needs, of America’s last ruling class. Rising from a middle-class New Jersey upbringing, he had become a pillar of the Republican Party (and a plausible candidate for its presidential nomination in 1920), a ubiquitous presence on the circuits of international power (he was Gladstone’s houseguest as a young man, dined with Kaiser Wilhelm in his early forties, met with Mussolini when Italian fascism was still new), a joiner and a leader so prolific in his associations and so enamored of his own renown that, year after year, he made certain that his was the longest entry in Who’s Who. This annual exercise in self- celebration cataloged honorary doctorates (writer Alva Johnston, who thought well of him, called Butler “a harvesting machine of university degrees”); club memberships (in New York alone, he belonged to the Century, the Union, the University, the Lotos, and the Metropolitan); publications (mostly repurposed speeches, few of them substantive, none of them memorable); and a sufficiency of other details that each year consumed more than a column and a half of tiny type, a mutable monument to his floodlit success.Whatever it was he was seeking, the man worked at it. He produced all those speeches without the aid of ghostwriters, and his workday was frighteningly efficient. Letters poured from the President’s House on Morningside Heights or from his office in Low Library in a volume that would overwhelm the hardiest archivist. He dictated each morning until noon, pacing back and forth, his coattails flying behind him, his secretaries desperately trying to keep up. Even the most trivial letters were answered within a day of their receipt at 60 Morningside Drive— or at his summer place in Southampton, on Long Island, or at the hotels in which he lived on his annual visits to Europe. In London he always stayed at the Berkeley, where he would receive wires from the States addressed in care of the hotel’s comically inappropriate cable address: sybarite, london.Butler’s European trips were largely the product of his long- held presidency of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a platform from which he helped negotiate the Kellogg- Briand Pact of 1928. This was a document that renounced war, a deeply Butlerian notion insofar as the nobility of its sentiment balanced precisely with its specious futility. Still, it was an accomplishment that earned him the Nobel Peace Prize three years later, which was a nice thing but probably not nearly as gratifying to Butler as the honor that would endure for forty- three years of his long life. The presidency of Columbia University had brought Butler everything he had—the club memberships, the patronage of the Republican hierarchy, the offer of railroad presidencies extended by E. H. Harriman and J. P. Morgan. But it had also brought him a problem that by his own admission had vexed the university’s board of trustees (and, therefore, Butler himself) since the day he had been installed as Columbia’s president in 1902: what to do with the eleven acres of midtown Manhattan that Columbia owned—land that produced so very little, and that if properly exploited could be worth so very, very much.Butler was not the first Columbia president to salivate over the potential revenue from the land, originally almost four full blocks stretching from 47th to 51st Street, from Fifth Avenue nearly all the way to Sixth. For decades the land had looked to Columbia’s officers and trustees much like a lamb chop must look to a wolf. But long before the institutional drooling had begun, the property was more nuisance than asset, acquired almost as a sort of booby prize in a state distribution of public lands.Originally part of the Dutch-controlled Common Lands assembled by Peter Minuit in 1624, the acreage that Butler would eventually turn into Columbia’s dowry became, by the end of the seventeenth century, property of the City of New York. But the city, such as it was, still lay huddled around the southern tip of Manhattan, and this twenty-acre chunk of hilly slopes and rocky promontories might as well have been in Poughkeepsie.To David Hosack, though, it was a convenient and comfortable ride up the carriage road that ran along the spine of Manhattan Island. Hosack was a man of parts, most of them glittering: physician, scholar, gentleman botanist, salonnier, friend to both Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. Through a provident marriage and his own native talents, he had by 1800 become one of the foremost citizens of the growing city. His portrait was painted by Rembrandt Peale; Tocqueville wrote of the pleasures of Hosack’s table. He was also a professor at the College of Physicians and Surgeons—precursor of Columbia’s medical school— and longed for a piece of land that he could turn into a garden of materia medica, a sort of natural pharmacy.Finding the ideal conditions for his garden about three and a half miles up the carriage road from the heart of inhabited New York, in 1801 he purchased the plot from the city for slightly less than five thousand dollars. Within three years the Elgin Botanical Garden, named after Hosack’s father’s birthplace in Scotland, bloomed with species from all over the world, some of them rare items contributed by Thomas Jefferson. A sixty-two- foot-long greenhouse anchored a row of structures running west from present-day Fifth Avenue. The entire plot was, Hosack noted with satisfaction, encircled by a “belt of forest trees and shrubs judiciously chequered and mingled,” which were in turn enclosed by an imposing stone wall, two and a half feet thick and seven feet high.Many years later a student of Hosack’s recalled his mentor as “a man of profuse expenditure” who “had he the wealth of Astor” would still never have had enough. Over the nearly ten years he owned the Elgin plot, Hosack tried to prove his student’s point, spilling nearly $100,000 into the garden until his wife’s fortune could no longer bear the leakage. Unable to find a buyer for land he could no longer afford, he turned to the state legislature, where he had many friends, for relief.* After two years’ effort, Hosack was able to persuade the lawmakers to give him $75,000 for a parcel of land that no one wanted.Including the state of New York. Soon the spot to which the city’s grandees had once proudly brought their European visitors became a near ruin. When the trustees of Columbia College came hat in hand to the state government seeking funds, just as their brethren at Union and Hamilton Colleges had done recently and successfully, the tapped-out legislature considered its empty pockets and instead gave Columbia land. The college trustees, whose existing buildings were confined to a plot of land on Park Place, some four miles away in downtown Manhattan, were more bemused than gratified. The trustees turned over responsibility for the plot to the son of a past Columbia president, but Clement Moore proved a better light poet (“’Twas the Night Before Christmas”) than an agricultural manager, and the place sank into utter decrepitude. By 1823 the best Columbia could do with Hosack’s Folly was rent it to a private individual for $125 a year and taxes.The evanescent Eden that was the Elgin Garden would manifest itself in the life of the city several times over the next century. Many of the surviving plant specimens were shipped off to the Bloomingdale Asylum in distant Morningside Heights, where they were planted on what would decades later become the site of Low Library, the dominant building on Columbia’s eventual campus. The Elgin itself became the model for the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx; Hosack’s large collection of horticultural texts was incorporated into its library. And both the carriage road that led to the garden and the pathway that fronted its south-facing expanse found their eventual forms in the city’s decision, in 1807, to appoint a commission to plan New York’s future. When they emerged from their deliberations four years later, the commissioners put forth a scheme to organize mile after mile of empty Manhattan terrain on a grid of 12 numbered avenues running north and south, and 155 similarly labeled streets crosshatching the island east and west. It was, wrote architect Rem Koolhaas in 1994, “the most courageous act of prediction in Western civilization: the land it divides, unoccupied; the population it describes, conjectural; the buildings it locates, phantoms; the activities it frames, non- existent.”But the grid gave names to the carriage road, which became Sixth Avenue, and to the pathway in front of the greenhouse, which became 50th Street. And what was soon known as Columbia’s Upper Estate (to distinguish it from the Lower Estate, its property downtown near City Hall) was now fixed on the map, and in the city’s history.In 1838, when the first crosstown streets of the city’s courageous imaginings were finally opened up in the area, Columbia’s nearly valueless land suddenly had a future. But there was no agreement at Columbia regarding what that future might be. The original downtown campus, a relic of the school’s beginnings as King’s College in 1747, was at best inadequate, and the prospect of a move to the leafy precincts of the Upper Estate was enticing. But so was the new opportunity, presented by the area’s incipient development, to do what colleges must do: make money. One faction believed the property was too valuable to use for education; the opposing view found its expression in the complaint of trustee Samuel B. Ruggles, who in 1854 wondered “at what point in the coming half century our speculating, land- loving, avaricious propensities are to cease, and our legitimate educational duties are to commence.”Land-loving avarice pinned educational duties to the mat. One chunk of the property, sixteen lots at the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 48th Street, had already been sold to the Dutch Reformed Church. A few years later the remaining frontage along Fifth Avenue between 48th and 49th Streets went to the Goelet family, landowners whose substantial Manhattan holdings—fifty- five acres in all—derived from the two Goelet brothers who had inherited the land from the man whose two daughters they had wisely married. Proceeds from the sales covered taxes, made a contribution to Columbia’s operating costs, and built, at last, the new campus on a two-acre plot down the road, east of Madison Avenue at 49th Street. Continuing income was expected to come, someday, from long-term ground leases on all that land in the Upper Estate.But in the late 1850s, ambitions flowering within the Roman Catholic archdiocese of New York—hardly a Columbia ally— suddenly spiked the land’s value. Brownstone houses rose in what Edith Wharton called a “chocolate-coloured coating of the most hideous stone ever quarried,” but which nonetheless produced perfectly lovely rents. Hosack’s land became the virtual guarantor of Columbia’s future solvency, not the last time it would play so noble a role.The man who decreed a new St. Patrick’s Cathedral on the plot facing the northernmost block of the Upper Estate was John J. “Dagger John” Hughes, the first archbishop of New York. Hughes was part cleric, part politician (antecedent of the Tammany bosses, he successfully ran slates of his own candidates for public office), and all Irishman. The city’s established German Catholics had made way for the wave upon wave of Irish immigrants who had flowed into New York in the previous two decades, and the Vatican had provided them with one of their own as a leader. Hughes almost instantly made the church the center of Irish life in New York, both the symbol of his people’s aspirations and the instrument by which they would achieve them.The trustees and officers of Columbia may have been, every one of them, Protestant members of the city’s commercial and genealogical elite, and may have included among their number, ex officio, the city’s Episcopal bishop, but they could hardly have objected to the grand plans that Hughes revealed on August 15, 1858. The Irish place in the city virtually certified by Hughes’s action, a crowd of 100,000 deliriously happy Catholics watched as the archbishop presided over the laying of the cornerstone for a building which, he said at the time, would cost more than $1.5 million. Never mind that the final cost, after more than two decades of construction, would exceed $4 million; never mind that, at the time of the cornerstone ceremony, Hughes had in hand pledges amounting to all of $73,000. Wrote one historian, “Hughes believed that if you took on a challenge, you would perforce rise to meet it.”Once met, Hughes’s challenge transformed New York. By the Civil War, Fifth Avenue had already begun to evolve into the city’s grandest thoroughfare, even if the grandeur largely resided below 23rd Street. But with the declarative punctuation of a lavish Gothic cathedral (even a Catholic one) inscribed at 50th Street, the northward rush accelerated. Almost as an ironic comment on the great gray cathedral, in a handsome residence one block north, with a staff of seven servants, lived Madame Restell, whose eminence as New York’s leading abortionist had made her as wealthy as she was infamous. But just south of St. Patrick’s rose a more congenial neighbor, the Buckingham Hotel. The Buckingham boasted in its advertising that “there is no noise, no confusion of porters or waiters, no loungers or patrons of the bar who are not guests of the house.” This was exactly the sort of reassurance that a thirty-eight-year-old oilman from Cleveland might have sought before moving his young family into the hotel in 1877. Occupying a suite that looked out directly upon the filigreed towers of the cathedral, John Davison Rockefeller may have appreciated the general calm of the Buckingham and its neighborhood, but at least one member of his family did not: years later, John D. Rockefeller Jr. said, “I can still hear the noise of the steel tires [of the carriages] rumbling along the street. It was fearfully noisy.”Around the same time, starting with the “Vanderbilt Colony” in the lower 50s, hothouse blooms of mythic splendor began to burst into life on Fifth. The Millionaires’ Mile grew into a lush garden of limestone turrets, marble finials, and formal porte cocheres. Behind Gothic windows outlined in lead and stone stretched grand ballrooms, mirrored galleries, rooms harboring Rembrandts, Flemish tapestries, furniture made for Marie Antoinette. Henry Clay Frick, whose own palace uptown on Fifth and 70th had not yet been built, estimated that the maintenance cost on just one of the Vanderbilt houses ran to $1,000 a day. Beside the Vanderbilt mansions—there were four in the space of two blocks, which was quite an accomplishment given the size of these beauties—stood houses for Astors, for Goelets, for the entire mercantile aristocracy of the Mauve Decades. Nathan Silver, in his Lost New York, called it “a visual summary of free enterprise and the history of architecture.” And, he might have added, of the gaudy rivalries of the superrich, expressing themselves in a can-you-top-this orgy of rabid self-indulgence. Richard Morris Hunt, the favored architect to the wealthy, said, “If they want a house with a chimney on the bottom, I’ll give them one.”The side streets throughout the 40s and 50s were substantially different, the better blocks lined with what Wharton considered “narrow houses…lacking in external dignity, so crammed with smug and suffocating upholstery,” but also featuring some relatively noble exemplars of Victorian luxury. One, directly across from the shaded lawns of St. Luke’s Hospital on 54th Street, just west of Fifth, was a present from railroad king Collis P. Huntington to his beloved mistress Arabella, the “unofficial Mrs. Huntington”—ergo, the recipient of gifts far grander than those bestowed on any old official wife. Four brownstone stories, dressed outside in demure threads of ivy and inside in the relatively understated style championed by the English aesthete Charles L. Eastlake, every cent of Huntington’s investment nonetheless showed: the rosewood and mother-of-pearl inlays in the maple cabinets, the stenciled canvas ceilings, the ebonized cherry furniture as solid and as worthy as a government bond. But in 1884 Arabella the Unofficial tired of 4 West 54th Street and swapped it for nine pieces of uptown real estate that belonged to John D. Rockefeller Sr. The new owner probably enjoyed nothing about his 54th Steet mansion quite so much as the opportunity it gave him, each winter, to skate leisurely around the frozen surface of its capacious yard. The Columbia land harbored few houses as grand as Rockefeller’s, but by 1879 every one of its 203 lots was developed and under long-term lease.For all the wonders of Fifth Avenue, there lurked to the west a street that acquired disrepute at nearly the same rate that Fifth achieved glory. Once Dr. Rufus Henry Gilbert had opened the Sixth Avenue Elevated Railway on a series of piers and joists that ran from the Battery all the way up to 58th Street, Sixth turned into a hell of clattering noise, smoke, and sunless gloom. Gilbert, a physician who had spent years ministering to the tubercular victims of the Industrial Revolution, saw his railway as a means for the slum dwellers of downtown New York to escape to the bright meadows of Central Park, which had been completed the previous decade. His noble goal was about as hardy as one would expect in nineteenth-century New York. A gang of swindlers, stock manipulators, and profiteers soon seized control of the Gilbert Patent Railway from the hapless doctor, and by its third birthday the el was firmly in the control of a syndicate of robber barons, including Jay Gould and Russell Sage. The latter, who lived in a Fifth Avenue mansion at 52nd Street, would begin his day by having his carriage deliver him to the el station at 50th Street. At least John D. Rockefeller, emerging from 4 West 54th after the shave administered by his personal barber, walked to his daily encounter with the el.Beneath the tracks, in the foul, murky shadows of the ungainly superstructure, there grew a netherworld of sin and sleaze—dance halls, brothels, crime-ridden bars. A Brooklyn clergyman called Sixth Avenue “a gaslit carnival of vice,” and that was one of the nicer things anyone said about it. In a way, it was a perfect release valve for the palace-lined Fifth; without having to bear the clutter of public transportation, the smooth asphalt of Fifth Avenue evolved into a fine road for carriages and a handsome promenade route to Central Park.But the presence of the el so near to hand, the promise of open vistas beside the park, and the inevitable northward march of the city’s commercial enterprises led in time to the decline even of Fifth. As various Vanderbilts and assorted Astors relocated to mansions in the stretch of the avenue that faced Central Park, the blocks in the 40s and lower 50s attracted retail and other businesses. By the second decade of the twentieth century, the area had taken on the complexion of commerce. The stores that had replaced the mansions on Fifth may have been suitably exclusive, but they were still stores; however refined the crowds they attracted might have been, they were still crowds. In the space of six years land values on Fifth Avenue, bid up by the merchants flocking to midtown, more than tripled. As the Automobile Age accelerated, the city mandated a fifteen-foot widening of the roadway to accommodate the press of traffic. One Vanderbilt mansion gave up its garden to the project, another its handsome stone steps. St. Patrick’s lost the grassy bank that buffered it from the street.Nothing, however, changed the neighborhood so much as Columbia’s decision to vacate its Madison Avenue buildings for the land it had purchased on upper Broadway in Morningside Heights. When the university abandoned its Collegiate Gothic structures east of Madison, Columbia’s relationship to the Upper Estate changed radically. “The attention of the trustees,” Butler wrote, “was divided between the important problems relating to the reorganization of the college and its development into a university and those growing out of the renewal of the leases on the Upper Estate.” Translated out of Butlerese, this meant that expansion on the grand scale of McKim, Mead & White’s Olympian campus on Morningside Heights had somehow to be financed, and the Upper Estate was the only cash cow in sight. The milking commenced in 1904, shortly after Butler’s presidency began. Over the protests of Columbia treasurer J. M. Nash, the southernmost block, between 47th and 48th Street, was sold for $3 million to pay for the land Columbia had acquired uptown. On a more sustained basis, the college attempted to renegotiate the remaining Upper Estate leases as they came up for renewal, but failed to wrest them entirely free of terms that had been set at the time of their original execution. Hurried along by some well-aimed lawsuits, and simultaneously seeking to maximize the value of the leases that did expire, Columbia stopped enforcing its 1859 restrictive covenants barring apartment houses and commercial or industrial use.This last act proved to be a tactical error that would, over time, mutate into a brilliant strategic coup. For with the suspension of the covenants, the Upper Estate began a plummet that turned it into a tawdry collection of rooming houses, brothels, speakeasies, and shoe repair shops able to bring in by 1928, at the very peak of an unprecedented economic boom, a pathetic $300,000 a year in ground rents. But because of the accident of these eleven acres remaining under a single ownership for the entire 127 years since Hosack acquired them, it was possible for someone to think about taking over the whole thing and building something grand—at the very least a new opera house, ideally with a handsome plaza in front of it.To Nicholas Murray Butler and Columbia treasurer Frederick A. Goetze, who was Butler’s primary fiscal adviser, custodian of funds, and financial agent, correspondence was as natural, and as essential, as breathing. Every day Butler’s lette