William Zeckendorf and the deal that brought the UN to New York
The 11th-hour deal that put the United Nations on a midtown site long covered by East River slums and slaughter-houses came in a frantic rush on Tuesday the 10th of December 1946, just the day before the General Assembly's deadline for decision.
All at once, John D. Rockefeller Jr. had offered to buy the land from developer William Zeckendorf and donate it to the UN. "If this property can be useful to you in meeting the great responsibilities entrusted to you by the people of the world," the old philanthropist told the delegates, "it will be a source of infinite satisfaction to me and my family."
As it happened, the good deed would not only please the famously generous family, it would eliminate a potential rival to Rockefeller Center: Zeckendorf had announced plans to fill the site with a center of his own, with apartments, offices and a new Metropolitan Opera House.
As it also happened, there was some question whether Zeckendorf had sufficient capital for that grand project anyway. Indeed, when he read in the paper over breakfast Dec. 6 that the long UN site search was stalled, he was very quick to offer up his riverfront property in the spirit of public service.
Thus it was that the Metropolitan Opera did not go to First Ave. and the United Nations did not go to Philadelphia.
President Franklin Roosevelt had fancied the Azores. Harry Truman thought delegates should meet around the world and "keep their offices in their hats." Some members favored Geneva, the League of Nations city. But the decision to locate in the U.S. and thus encourage American participation, the absence of which had been largely the reason the old league had failed had been made even before the original 51 members wrote the formal UN charter in San Francisco in the summer of 1945.
Now, in a postwar atmosphere charged with noble hopes for a world free of conquerors and jackboots, the fledgling United Nations got down to business in scattered temporary rooms around New York City. The General Assembly settled into the ice rink on the old World's Fair grounds in Queens. The Security Council moved into the gym on Hunter College's Bronx campus, which had been a WAVES training center during the war and was still full of hair dryers.
The noble hopes were soon deflated by Russia's nyet at every crucial vote. Meeting at the Henry Hudson Hotel to write rules for future peacekeepers, the military staff committee found itself regularly stymied by Russian objections. Moscow also blocked proposals for atomic weapons control and a census of each nation's armed forces. A new world war, the Cold War, had already begun, and the great global police force still had no permanent headquarters of its own.
The principal candidates were San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia and the New York area, including Hyde Park and Mount Vernon. But the mayors of Chicago and Denver also were pitching their cities. Martha's Vineyard was an applicant. Even the Black Hills of the Dakotas were suggested.
In New York, Robert Moses, commissioner of parks and much else, was determined to give the UN the World's Fair grounds; the tract was already paid for, and a UN presence there would help justify the cost of the fair. But delegates said no thanks. One Briton likened Flushing Meadows to "the coastal swamps of Southwest Africa."
By February 1946, site selection had focused on Westchester and Fairfield County, Conn. Interest cooled, however, after Greenwich citizens voted 5,505 to 2,019 against anything in their backyard and inspectors visiting the area were pelted with stones.
In November, the selection committee made a final tour of the main prospects. Washington had indicated no favorite, but on Dec. 3, Truman offered the Presidio, the spectacular military site on San Francisco Bay. Russia said nyet and three days later UN Secretary General Trygve Lie informed Mayor William O'Dwyer that New York was out as well if Flushing was the best the city could do.
It looked like the United Nations would go to Philadelphia.
For the past year, Zeckendorf had been buying up the slaughterhouses north of 42nd St. between First Ave. and the East River and the surrounding tenements of Turtle Bay, so named because the area had indeed once been a bay, until the 1860s, when it was filled in. Plans already had been drawn up for Zeckendorf's proposed X-City. Now, the developer put down his breakfast paper, called O'Dwyer and offered 17 acres to the UN at, he said, "any price they wish to pay."
Wallace Harrison, a chief architect of Rockefeller Center and the man Zeckendorf had brought in to design X-City, reached Nelson Rockefeller in Mexico City. Rockefeller flew home Sunday, Dec. 8, and convened a family meeting at which his father, John D. Jr., authorized exploration of two possibilities Zeckendorf's site, or part of the Rockefellers' Pocantico estate near Tarrytown. Harrison hurriedly revamped the X-City drawings erasing "Metropolitan Opera" and scribbling in "General Assembly," for example and Nelson Rockefeller got each of his brothers to kick in 1,000 acres of their Pocantico shares.
The UN diplomats turned down Pocantico. It was Turtle Bay or nothing. Late Tuesday night, Nelson phoned John D. to propose offering Zeckendorf $8.5 million.
The father agreed. The son said: "Aw, gee, Pa, that's great!"
Then Harrison was dispatched to find Zeckendorf at the Monte Carlo nightclub. There, Zeckendorf circled the site on Harrison's maps and signed over a 30-day option.
First Ave. was widely known as Blood Alley. The slaughterhouses were so vile that the Tudor City apartments across the avenue had been built without riverview windows. Now, from this rubble, there would arise a mighty monument to peace on Earth.
First published on June 28, 1998 as part of the "Big Town" series on old New York. Find more stories about the city's epic history here.
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