THE HISTORY BEHIND THE SUBTERRANEAN RETAIL HUBS OF ROCKEFELLER CENTER, GRAND CENTRAL AND PENN STATION

There’s nothing like an epic snowstorm to make you want to hide underground. We recently caught up with Eastern Consolidated principal Adelaide Polsinelli and New York Historical Tours director Kevin Draper and did just that at three of the city’s most famous spots for subterranean shopping.

The 22 acres that cover Rockefeller Center were the original home of the New York Botanical Garden, before it moved to the Bronx. In the 1850s, Columbia University began buying up land in the area, and leased the land out to users, most famously John D Rockefeller Jr., until the land was sold to The Rockefeller Group in 1985. (Tishman Speyer owns it now, after paying $1.85B for it in 2000. RXR picked up a 99-year ground lease for 75 Rockefeller Plaza for $420M in late 2012.)

Kevin says it came down to a combination of historical accident and real estate acumen that brought Rockefeller Center into being. Oh, and the massive oil and real estate fortune Rockefeller could deploy. That didn’t hurt.

In the 1920s, banking magnate Otto Kahn convinced Rockefeller to build a new opera house at the site. Trouble was, the Great Depression hit, the opera house as originally conceived proved not to be viable, and Rockefeller was faced with a choice: pull out of the project or double down and do something transformative and finance it mostly on his own.

He chose the latter, and Kevin says that to do it, Rockefeller had to do what today would be just about unthinkable: he approached every individual tenant in the low-rise buildings on the land and convinced them to take a buyout.

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