Rockefeller Center

Rockefeller Center is a complex of 19 commercial buildings between 48th and 51st street in New York. It's located in the center of Midtown Manhattan, straddling both Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas. Today's Rockefeller Center is essentially a combination of two building complexes, The older Art-Deco office buildings from the 1930's and a set of four International-style towers built along the Avenue of the Americas during the 1960's and 1970's.

It was named after John D. Rockefeller who leased the space from Columbia University in 1928 and developed it between 1929 and 1940. Rockefeller initially planned an opera house on the site, but changed his mind after the stock market crash of 1929. Construction in Art Deco style began in 1929. One of the complex's first tenants was The Radio Corporation of America, hence the names "Radio City" and "Radio City Music Hall."

Paul Manship's gilded statue of Prometheus bringing fire to mankind features prominently. It stands above an below-level plaza which is used as an ice-skating rink during winter.

The centerpiece of Rockefeller Center is the 71-floor 872-foot RCA Building, which was renamed the GE Building in the 1980s after General Electric (GE) acquired RCA. It stands in front of the sunken plaza where the statue of Promotheus now stands. Unlike most other Art-Deco towers built during the 1930s the GE Building was constructed as a slab with a flat roof.

The nation's largest indoor theater, Radio City Music Hall, is based in the Rockefeller Center complex.