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Rockefeller Center - Wikipedia

In 1928, the site's then-owner, Columbia University, leased the land to John D. Rockefeller Jr., who was the main person behind the complex's construction. Originally envisioned as the site for a new Metropolitan Opera en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefell…

building, the current Rockefeller Center came about after the Met could not afford to move to the proposed new building. Various plans were discussed before the current one was approved in 1932. Construction of Rockefeller Center started in 1931, and the first buildings opened in

1933. The core of the complex was completed by 1939.

The original center has several sections. Radio City, along Sixth Avenue and centered on 30 Rockefeller Plaza, includes Radio City Music Hall and was built for RCA's radio-related enterprises such as NBC.

The first private owner of the site was physician David Hosack, who purchased twenty acres of rural land from New York City in 1801 for $5,000 and opened the country's first botanical garden, the Elgin Botanic Garden, on the site. The gardens operated until 1811, and by 1823,

ended up in the ownership of Columbia University. Columbia moved its main campus north to Morningside Heights by the turn of the century.

David Hosack FRS FRSE FLS (August 31, 1769 – December 22, 1835) was a noted American physician, botanist, and educator. He remains widely

known as the doctor who tended to the fatal injuries of Alexander Hamilton after his duel with Aaron Burr in July 1804, and who had similarly tended to Hamilton's son Philip after his fatal 1801 duel with George Eacker.
Hamilton took the lead in the federal government's funding

of the states' American Revolutionary War debts, as well as establishing the nation's first two de facto central banks (i.e. the Bank of North America and the First Bank of the United States), a system of tariffs, and friendly trade relations with Britain.

In September 1799,

Burr fought a duel with John Barker Church, whose wife Angelica was the sister of Alexander Hamilton's wife Elizabeth. Church had accused Burr of taking a bribe from the Holland Company in exchange for his political influence.

In 1799, Burr founded the Bank of the Manhattan

Company, and the enmity between him and Hamilton may have arisen from how he did so. Before the establishment of Burr's bank, the Federalists held a monopoly on banking interests in New York via the federal government's Bank of the United States and Hamilton's Bank of New York.

Chase National Bank was formed in 1877 by John Thompson. It was named after former United States Treasury Secretary and Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, although Chase did not have a connection with the bank

In 1863, together with his sons, Samuel and Frederick, John Thompson

founded First National Bank of the City of New York (a predecessor to today's Citibank) in 1863; it opened its doors on July 22 of that year. George Fisher Baker became president of the bank after the Thompsons left the bank in the hands of Harris C. Fahnestock, a former partner

of railroad financier Jay Cooke in the banking firm of Jay Cooke & Company, in 1877.

The bank was known as Chase Manhattan Bank until it merged with J.P. Morgan & Co. in 2000. Chase Manhattan Bank was formed by the merger of the Chase National Bank and the Manhattan Company in

1955. The bank merged with Bank One Corporation in 2004 and later acquired the deposits and most assets of Washington Mutual.

In 2006, the modern-day Chase bought the retail banking division of the Bank of New York, which then only months later merged with Pittsburgh-based

Mellon Financial to form the present-day BNY Mellon.

However, its most significant acquisition was that of the Equitable Trust Company of New York in 1930, the largest stockholder of which was John D. Rockefeller, Jr. This made Chase the largest bank in the US and indeed, in

the world.
Chase was primarily a wholesale bank, dealing with other prominent financial institutions and major corporate clients, such as General Electric, which had, through its RCA subsidiary, leased prominent space and become a crucial first tenant of Rockefeller Center,

rescuing that major project in 1930. The bank is also closely associated with and has financed the oil industry, having longstanding connections with its board of directors to the successor companies of Standard Oil, especially ExxonMobil, which are also Rockefeller holdings.

The deal was therefore structured as an acquisition by the Bank of the Manhattan Company of Chase National, with John J. McCloy becoming chairman of the merged entity.

John Jay McCloy (March 31, 1895 – March 11, 1989) was an American lawyer, diplomat, banker, and a presidential

advisor. He served as Assistant Secretary of War during World War II under Henry Stimson, helping deal with issues such as German sabotage, political tensions in the North Africa Campaign, and opposing the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war, he served as the

president of the World Bank, U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Warren Commission, and a prominent United States adviser to all presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan.

In 1930, McCloy married Ellen Zinsser, a native of Hastings-on-Hudson, New York and a 1918 graduate of Smith College.

He did a great deal of work for corporations in Nazi Germany and advised the major German chemical combine I. G. Farben.

On April 22, 1941, he was made

Assistant Secretary of War but held only civilian responsibilities, especially the purchase of war materials for the Army, Lend Lease, the draft, and issues of intelligence and sabotage.

An indefatigable committee member, McCloy during the war served on the government task

forces that built the Pentagon, created the Office of Strategic Services, which eventually became the Central Intelligence Agency, and he proposed both the United Nations and the war crimes tribunals. He chaired the predecessor to the National Security Council.

McCloy tried to convince President Truman that an invasion of Japan was not sensible. By mid-1945, the Japanese emperor began looking for ways to unwind the war, going as far as asking the Soviet Union to broker a peace between the United States and Japan. Through Magic

intercepts, McCloy had known that the emperor was prepared to surrender if assurances to preserve the Japanese monarchy were given. As such, he advised Truman to offer terms of surrender that offered such a guarantee bundled with the implied threat of using the atomic bomb

against Japan. He argued that by doing so, it would enable the United States to claim a moral high ground, in the event that a bombing would be needed to thwart a Japanese mainland invasion. While traveling by boat to the Potsdam Conference, Secretary of State James Byrnes

convinced Truman to ignore McCloy's advice. Eventually, Truman ordered the atomic bombs to be dropped as soon as they were ready.

In 1945, he and Stimson convinced President Truman to reject the Morgenthau Plan and to avoid stripping Germany of its industrial capacity

On September 2, 1949, McCloy replaced the previous five successive military governors for the US Zone in Germany as the first US High Commissioner for Germany and held the position until August 1, 1952. He oversaw the further creation of the Federal Republic of Germany after

May 23 of 1949. At the strong urging of the German government, he approved recommendations for pardoning and commutation of sentences of Nazi criminals including those of the prominent industrialists Friedrich Flick, Alfried Krupp, and Einsatzgruppe commander Martin Sandberger.

McCloy granted the restitution of Krupp's and Flick's entire property.

Following his service in Germany, he served as chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank from 1953 to 1960 (but there was no "Chase Manhattan Bank" before 1955), and as chairman of the Ford Foundation from 1958 to

1965; he was also a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1946 to 1949, and then again from 1953 to 1958, before he took up the position at Ford.

From 1954 to 1970, he was chairman of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations in New York, to be succeeded by David

Rockefeller, who had worked closely with him at the Chase Bank. McCloy had a long association with the Rockefeller family, going back to his early Harvard days when he taught the young Rockefeller brothers how to sail. He was also a member of the Draper Committee, formed in 1958

by Eisenhower.

McCloy was selected by President Lyndon Johnson to serve on the Warren Commission in late November 1963. Notably, he was initially skeptical of the lone gunman theory, but a trip to Dallas with CIA veteran Allen Dulles, an old friend also serving on the

commission, convinced him of the case against Oswald.

McCloy became a name partner in the Rockefeller-associated prominent New York law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy. He would serve here from 1945 to 1947, and then after serving on the Warren Commission, remained a

general partner for 27 years, until he died in 1989. In that capacity, he acted for the "Seven Sisters", the leading multinational oil companies, including Exxon, in their initial confrontations with the nationalization movement in Libya as well as negotiations with Saudi Arabia

and OPEC. Because of his stature in the legal world and his long association with the Rockefellers and as a presidential adviser, he was sometimes referred to as the "Chairman of the American Establishment."

McCloy is also remembered for his role in forming the predecessor of

the Central Intelligence Agency. He was tasked by Henry Stimson in the early 1940s to sort out the political tensions in the pre-war intelligence community, which was marked by political infighting and jurisdictional disputes among the chiefs of the Army and Navy and the FBI

director, J. Edgar Hoover. To sort out the issue, he and William Donovan created a new intelligence program, Office of Strategic Services, that attempted to fuse and streamline those forms of intelligence and is modeled after the British intelligence agencies. The centralization

of the war intelligence office became a blueprint for the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency under the National Security Act of 1947.

Frederick G. Zinsser (March 21, 1868 – January 20, 1956) was a resident of Hastings-on-Hudson, New York who established a chemical plant

on the waterfront of the Hudson River called Zinsser & Company, which synthesized organic chemicals. The Zinsser plant was as one of the establishments contracted to produce mustard gas during the First World War.
Frederick married Emma Sharman and they had three children, they

raised them in a well-to-do German-speaking household. (The son John attended Harvard University, and was a chemist and associated with his father for some years, then later became vice chairman of the board of Merck & Co. of Rahway, New Jersey and president of Sharp & Dohme Inc.

of Philadelphia and was on the board of directors of the investment bank JP Morgan in New York during the 1940s. The two daughters Ellen and Margaret (“Peggy”) both attended Smith College and were sent to Germany to complete their education. “Peggy” married Lewis Williams

Douglas, scion of one of the most powerful families in Arizona and sole heir of the Phelps Dodge copper mining fortune, who succeeded Harriman as ambassador to London. Ellen married John J. McCloy, the chief lawyer for the Rockefeller and the “Seven Sisters” interests, member

of the Warren Commission, and advisor to nine US presidents.)

Konrad Hermann Joseph Adenauer (German: [ˈkɔnʁaːt ˈʔaːdənaʊɐ] (listen); 5 January 1876 – 19 April 1967) was a German statesman who served as the first chancellor of West Germany from 1949 to 1963.

Auguste Amalie

Julie Adenauer , née Zinsser; briefly Gussie Adenauer (born December 7, 1895 in Cologne , † March 3, 1948 in Rhöndorf ) was the second wife of Konrad Adenauer .

Auguste Zinsser was born in 1895 as the eldest daughter of Wilhelmine Zinsser, b. Tourelle (1870–1952) and the

dermatologist , university professor and later rector of the University of Cologne , Ferdinand Zinsser (1865–1952).

After Konrad Adenauer had been deposed as Lord Mayor of Cologne by the National Socialists on March 13, 1933, he went into hiding in order to avoid the threat of

arrest . Gussie initially stayed in Cologne with the seven children. When the National Socialists confiscated her house, she moved with the children to the St. Elisabeth Hohenlind hospital. She followed her husband to Neubabelsberg on May 1, 1934 and moved with him to Rhöndorf

in 1935, after his application to the Reich Ministry of the Interior under Wilhelm Frick had been rejected in 1934 . Augustes brother, the architect Ernst Zinsser , built in Rhöndorf, a home that the Adenauer family was able to move into in 1937.