ABSTRACT
By selecting Manhattan for its permanent home in 1945, the United Nations (U.N.) officially made New York the world's preeminent city. It was already considered world class but, with all the major European cities devastated by World War II, Gotham stood out as the sole intact Western center of power, wealth, culture, and hope. In 1949, the writer E. B. White pointed out how ironic it was that, although the capitol of neither a state nor a country, New York City was fast «becoming the capitol of the world."l
It was Nelson Rockefeller, president of Rockefeller Center, who got his father, John D. Jr., to donate $8.5 million to the U.N. in order to insure that it would settle in New York City rather than Boston, Philadelphia, or San Francisco. Nelson Rockefeller believed that the world organization should be located in the world's center of finance, culture, and communications. In order to solidify that role, the Rockefellers helped develop Lincoln Center, which, when completed in 1969, made New York «the World Center of the Performing Arts." Also during the sixties, Nelson, as governor of New York State, and his brother, David, as president of Chase Manhattan Bank, conceived the World Trade Center. The Rockefellers used their immense wealth and power to translate the idea of a world city into reality. 2
During the post-World War II era, New York City's economic prominence reached amazing new heights. It had the greatest population (7.5 million), the most factories, the busiest port, and the largest markets-wholesale, retail, and financial. Moreover, it became «headquarters city" because it was home to 136 of the nation's top 500 industrial companies. Their huge, linear, glass, and steel skyscrapers with their soaring shapes and gleaming facades created what
the architect Le Corbusier called a "vertical city." This "international school" of architecture was paralleled by abstract expressionism in painting. Called "the New York School," it was really a universal school that rejected both place and representation. In all of these ways) Gotham was greater than itself. As Le Corbusier observed) "Today it belongs to the world. Without anyone expecting it) it has become the jewel in the crown of universal cities...New York is a great diamond) hard and dry) sparkling) triumphant."3
