Great Fortune Quotes

“Most of all, though, he was certain. Doubt did not cloud his days, nor did it disturb his dreams.”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“a man on a scaffold throwing a tree at another man on another scaffold.”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“political identity that Bertram Wolfe characterized as “an undigested mixture of Spanish anarchism, Russian terrorism, Soviet Marxism-Leninism [and] Mexican agrarianism.”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“his association with the Rockefellers had inflated his already healthy sense of self to a point of bloated grandiosity, and”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“I would rather be a lamppost in New York than mayor of Chicago,” Walker once said,”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“Photographer William Leftwich was rewarded for his nervy visit to the uppermost reaches of the RCA’s steel frame when two workers standing fifteen feet apart on a single beam began to toss a football back and forth.”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“one man used a portable forge to heat rivets to the glowing point, pulled each one from the fire with tongs and threw it across open space to a crewmember who would catch the burning metal in a can.”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“not most, of the high-steel workers were Caughnawaga Mohawks from upstate New York.”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“Time and Fortune, a columnist wrote, “We wonder if there will ever be any building again.” Sixty-four percent of the city’s construction workers were unemployed.”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“and in December 1931 parts of New York looked as if God had gotten bored with the Creation business in the middle of the sixth day and simply walked off the job. Work”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“Junior was fundamentally free of anti-Semitism, and maintained throughout his life social, professional, and philanthropic bonds with a number of Jews. But”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“Art is one of the great resources of my life,” Abby had written the year before. “I believe that it not only enriches the spiritual life, but that it makes one more sane and sympathetic, more observant and understanding, regardless of whatever age it springs from, whatever subject it represents.”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“3 East 84th still looks both fitting and fresh. It also looks familiar: the limestone”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“At the Beaux-Arts he was that most admired of students, “a second-place man.” First place in academic competitions belonged to the highly capable and absolutely conventional; the truly brilliant, whose innovative work made the masters at the Ecole uneasy, learned to be content with second.”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“whose four-story limestone mansion at 12 West 49th was sufficient for himself and his wife, while the neighboring houses at numbers 10 and 14 provided him with protection against development from the east and, to his west, a place to store his books and paintings.”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“Until 1868 there wasn’t a single school of architecture in the United States, and the conventional apprentice system proved of little utility when the first skyscrapers”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“Rockefeller properties: his own house; the annex next door at number 12 (acquired in part to hang the Unicorn Tapestries, which just didn’t seem to fit in the nine stories of number 10); his father’s house, the old Huntington mansion, at number 4; the family gardens at numbers 6 and 8; and, backing onto those, numbers 5 and 7 West 53rd Street, the double mansion that was the winter home of Junior’s sister, Alma Rockefeller Prentice.”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center