Rockefeller Center Rockefeller Center Rockefeller Center is a large complex consisting of 19 commercial buildings covering between 48th and 51st Streets, facing Fifth Avenue, in New York City. Commissioned by the Rockefeller family, it is located in the center of Midtown Manhattan. The 14 original Art Deco buildings span the area between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, split by a large sunken square and a private street called Rockefeller Plaza. Five International Style buildings, built later, are located on the west side of Sixth Avenue and at the north end of Rockefeller Plaza. In 1928, the site's then-owner, Columbia University, leased the land
John Sterling Rockefeller Yale University, where he was a member of the Scroll and Key Society. He graduated from Yale in 1928. In July 1928 Rockefeller, his Yale classmate Charles B. G. Murphy, and the Canadian collector and taxidermist Allan Moses went to Africa on an ornithological expedition to collect specimens for the American Museum of Natural History. The survey was funded by a grant of approximately $150,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation. The main goal of the expedition was to find and collect the rare Grauer's broadbill, which was known only by one 1908 specimen in the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum in England,