Rockefeller Group is an American private company based in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

, primarily involved in real estate operations in the United States and it is a subsidiary of

Mitsubishi Estate is one of the largest real-estate developers in Japan and is involved in property management and architecture research and design. As of 2018, Mitsubishi Estate has the most valuable portfolio in the Japanese real estate industry, with a total ...

Co. The company began with the development of

Rockefeller Center Rockefeller Center is a large complex consisting of 19 commerce, commercial buildings covering between 48th Street (Manhattan), 48th Street and 51st Street (Manhattan), 51st Street in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. The 14 original Art Deco ...

. After building the original ,

Art Deco Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the Unite ...

complex from 1931 to 1939 (the company name was then the Metropolitan Square Corporation), the company developed several towers in the immediate vicinity from the late 1940s into the 1950s and 1960s. It entered into a partnership with

Time Inc. Time Inc. was an American worldwide mass media corporation founded on November 28, 1922, by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden and based in New York City. It owned and published over 100 magazine brands, including its namesake ''Time'', ''Sports Illu ...

and constructed a 48-story building for the company that opened in 1959; this spearheaded the expansion of the Center to the west of 6th Avenue,

Avenue of the Americas Sixth Avenue – also known as Avenue of the Americas, although this name is seldom used by New Yorkers, p.24 – is a major thoroughfare in New York City's borough of Manhattan, on which traffic runs northbound, or "uptown". It is commercial ...

. By the early 1970s, it had added a total of four

International Style International style may refer to: * International Style (architecture), the early 20th century modern movement in architecture *International style (art), the International Gothic style in medieval art *International Style (dancing), a term used in ...

towers to Rockefeller Center, more than doubling the size of the original complex. Today, Rockefeller Group maintains an ownership/management position in the of office space that makes up Rockefeller Center's western corridor (the newer buildings located west of Sixth Avenue). The eastern and original part of the Center is now owned by

Tishman Speyer Tishman Speyer Properties is an American company that invests in real estate. History The firm was founded in 1978 by Robert Tishman and Jerry Speyer. In March 1988, the company announced its first project in Europe, the construction of a 70-s ...

(who also serves as manager) and the

Lester Crown Lester Crown (born June 7, 1925) is an American businessman and is the son of Chicago financier Henry Crown (died 1990), who created the General Dynamics#Management churn, Material Service Corporation with two brothers in 1919, which merged with ...

family of Chicago, Illinois. Of course, this is all true. Missing, however, is any account of how the original pre-WWII buildings passed to new owners in the 1990s. It was by what might be described as "a successful bankruptcy." Prior to its sale to Mitubishi, the company took out an enormous loan, secured by the pre-WWII buildings, and paid much of the proceeds to its prior (Rockefeller family) shareholders. When the real estate market later turned sour, Mitsubishi caused it to default on its loan repayments, file for bankruptcy and forfeit the historic buildings in a bankruptcy sale.

References

External links

Company website

Group A group is a number of persons or things that are located, gathered, or classed together. Groups of people * Cultural group, a group whose members share the same cultural identity * Ethnic group, a group whose members share the same ethnic iden ...

Rockefeller family Companies based in Manhattan {{Manhattan-struct-stub