Quick Take
- Narration: Christopher Grove handles the large cast of characters and the shifting registers of Okrent’s prose with authority, his voice suits the gravitas of the subject without making the comic moments feel incongruous.
- Themes: The collision of wealth, vision, and politics in American architecture, New York as an organism with a beating commercial heart, the Rockefeller dynasty and its contradictions
- Mood: Rich and immersive, like standing in the middle of Rockefeller Center on a clear autumn afternoon and realizing you are inside a monument
- Verdict: At over twenty-two hours, this is a genuine commitment, but Okrent’s Pulitzer-finalist account of how Rockefeller Center came to be is worth every minute for anyone who has ever looked up at those towers and wondered.
I was in New York last October and spent an afternoon at Rockefeller Center specifically because I had been listening to Daniel Okrent’s Great Fortune on the train down. By the time I arrived I felt like a slightly obsessive architectural tourist, pausing in the Channel Gardens to try to mentally reconstruct the sequence of decisions that had placed me there: the reluctant Rockefeller financing, the Depression-era pivots, the argument about Diego Rivera’s mural, the sheer unlikely fact that any of this got built at all. Okrent had done that to me, and Christopher Grove’s narration had kept me at it for over twenty hours without once feeling like it was time to stop.
This is popular history operating at the level of genuine ambition. The comparison to David McCullough’s The Great Bridge in the publisher’s copy is not entirely promotional, both books treat a specific architectural project as a lens on a whole civilization, using the particular as a path into the general. Where McCullough’s Brooklyn Bridge story is about Irish immigrant labor and the engineering of the impossible, Okrent’s Rockefeller Center story is about money, politics, art, and the specific texture of New York in the years between the wars.
Four Men and the Shape of a Complex
Okrent organizes his narrative around four figures: John D. Rockefeller Sr., his son John D. Rockefeller Jr., real estate operator John R. Todd, and architect Raymond Hood. The decision to center on these four rather than treating the project as an institutional story is the book’s essential structural choice, and it pays off. Each man represents a different kind of power and a different set of priorities, and their negotiations, sometimes cooperative, sometimes antagonistic, occasionally farcical, are what produce the buildings we see today.
Rockefeller Jr. is the most interesting figure here, partly because he is the least theatrical. Where his father was a figure of almost mythological accumulation and his son Nelson was a political creature of obvious ambitions, the Jr. who commissioned and financed this complex was a man of genuine aesthetic seriousness and considerable moral anxiety about what he was doing and why. Okrent traces his evolution from reluctant patron to committed champion of the project with real psychological acuity.
The Depression as Context and Pressure
One of Okrent’s most impressive achievements is keeping the Depression-era economic context alive throughout the book without letting it become oppressive. The timing of Rockefeller Center, conceived in the late 1920s, built through the worst years of the Depression, shapes every decision in the story. The willingness to continue construction while unemployment devastated the surrounding city was both economically rational (construction costs had fallen sharply) and politically loaded. Okrent does not shy away from the contradictions.
The labor questions, the tenant negotiations, the desperate search for major tenants to fill commercial space in a collapsing real estate market, all of this is rendered with a vividness that makes the financial and logistical history feel as dramatic as the architectural decisions. One reviewer describes Okrent as providing both “the big picture” of architecture, politics, and economics and “the little picture” of anecdotes including a maintenance crew scraping twenty pounds of chewing gum from Radio City Music Hall seats in 1965. That tonal range is the book’s real achievement.
The Diego Rivera Episode and Its Consequences
The story of Diego Rivera’s mural in 30 Rockefeller Plaza, commissioned, completed with a portrait of Lenin that the Rockefellers had explicitly asked him not to include, controversially destroyed, is handled with appropriate dramatic weight and genuine nuance. Okrent’s sympathy is distributed more fairly than the story’s mythology usually allows: Rivera was not simply a heroic artist martyred by philistine capitalism, and Nelson Rockefeller was not simply a censoring plutocrat. Both were operating under constraints and pursuing incompatible objectives, and the collision between them illuminates something real about the relationship between art, patronage, and political content.
Christopher Grove brings the right register to these passages, neither satirical nor solemn, but something in between that acknowledges the absurdity without dismissing the principle. Over twenty-two hours he sustains this tonal balance throughout a text that moves between architectural description, financial history, biography, and social comedy in rapid succession.
Who Should Listen and Who Should Skip
Listeners who have enjoyed Robert Caro’s New York writing, or McCullough’s American architectural histories, or Ron Chernow’s Rockefeller biography, will find Okrent’s book a natural companion. New Yorkers and frequent visitors who walk through Rockefeller Center with even passing curiosity will find this book permanently changes their experience of the complex. The twenty-two-hour runtime requires genuine commitment; this is not a background-noise audiobook but one that demands attention. One reviewer notes that the first ninety percent holds interest completely and the final section describing later history is somewhat less gripping, an honest assessment worth knowing before you begin.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is prior knowledge of New York history or architecture necessary to enjoy Great Fortune?
Not necessary, but some familiarity with New York between the wars enriches the experience. Okrent provides context for figures and events as they arise, and the book works as an introduction to the period as well as a specific history of the building complex.
At over twenty-two hours, does Great Fortune maintain its momentum throughout?
Largely yes, one reviewer describes the first ninety percent as completely absorbing, with some diminishment in the final section covering later history. The narrative drive peaks during the construction and opening phases of the complex, which occupy the majority of the runtime.
Does Okrent cover the Radio City Music Hall and the Rockettes as part of the Rockefeller Center story?
Yes. Radio City Music Hall is treated as a major component of the complex and its cultural history, including the Rockettes and the theater’s architectural significance, receives extended attention within the broader narrative.
How does Christopher Grove’s narration handle the shifting tones between financial history, biography, and anecdote?
Grove manages the tonal variation well, bringing appropriate weight to the serious passages without making the book’s humor feel incongruous. Reviewers consistently praise both the writing and narration as complementary, with no noted passages where the narration works against the text.
