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| Real Estate & Land |
Land Through the Generations
Daniel Gross
06/01/2004
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Of all the
family’s assets, Junior’s five sons latched onto Rockefeller Center as the one
with the most commercial promise. “My brothers and I would like to keep it in
the family as a living symbol of the great tradition which you, and Grandfather
before you, have built,” Nelson Rockefeller wrote to his father after World War
II. Junior, who never had much of a head for business, sold the project to his
sons for $2.2 million plus $80 million in assumed debt. In the end, he lost
about $110 million on the project.
Many of us who own valuable property are
tempted to simply collect the rent and move on. By contrast, the third
generation of Rockefellers sought to build the family fortune, rather than
merely spend or preserve it. Real estate development in Manhattan offered an
appealing means of doing so.In the 1950s and 1960s, the brothers—who were
separately involved in banking, politics, venture capital and philanthropy—built
a series of modernist skyscrapers on the Avenue of the Americas, thus
establishing a new corridor of office buildings.
In 1990, the Rockefellers
cashed out by selling 80 percent of the complex to Mitsubishi for $1.37
billion. David Rockefeller’s trust received $171.3 million. “Not a bad return
considering that I bought my original 20 percent interest in Rockefeller Center
from Father in 1948 for $442,000!” he cheerily recalled in his Memoirs,
published in 2002. After a series of moves that saw David join a consortium to
repurchase Rockefeller Center, the complex was sold in 2000 for $1.85 billion.
In the end, of all the commercial ventures launched by the family in the 20th
century, Rockefeller Center may have proved the most successful.
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