Big Apple History . Building the Big Apple . Capital of the World


	The The United Nations Building.

The flourishing city of New York seemed like a promised land to a new wave of African Americans moving up from the South. Some even sang, "Hallalujah. I am on my way to the promised land" on their travels up north. The postwar booming city also became much more multicultural thanks to the immigration of many Puerto Ricans. By 1949, 300,000 Puerto Ricans had moved into the five boroughs. Both sets of newcomers found it hard to rise out of menial employment, partly because of racism, but also because they had come for manufacturing jobs and the manufacturing base was moving out of the city to the suburbs or was relocating to the Sun Belt. In the period from 1935-1950, New York was on an economic, and industrial rise. In 1950, New York had more than one million industrial jobs, but that number would be the city's manufacturing peak: by the year 2000, there would only be 200,000 industrial jobs left in the city. The postwar economy and the federal highway system created under Eisenhower produced an American manufacturing boom, but one that bypassed New York.

While the manufacturing plants of big businesses were slowly leaving Manhattan, the headquarters of multinational conglomerates were moving in. New York was making the shift to a post-industrial city. The city reinvented itself as a gleaming metropolis of glass and steel. Every business felt like it had to have a New York office to demonstrate its international importance.

With the building in 1949 of the United Nations' headquarters on Manhattan's East Side, New York truly became the world's capital. The United Nations, an international alliance for peace, was brought into existence in October 1945 without a permanent home. Multicultural New York, with more than sixty ethnic groups living closely together, seemed the perfect location for the international organization, a model for the new world order.

NEW YORKER writer E.B. White called the new U.N. complex "the greatest housing project of them all ... to shelter, this time, all governments, and to clear the slum called war. New York is ... becoming the capital of the world." The United Nations building had a role to perform on the world stage and it had an international architectural style to go with it. It was different from New York's other signature buildings built before it. The older buildings had a unique look and feel that gave the city a particular visual identity. The United Nations building, in contrast, could have been at home in any modern city. Its style heralded a great change in New York architectural history. Many buildings constructed after it would be built to make the city seem less local and more anonymous.

The presence of the United Nations complex in New York did more than symbolize the city's status as capital of the world. Its chief architect, Le Corbusier, was an architecture and urban theorist who dramatically changed the shape of the city. As the leading architect on the project, he had a lot of influence as to where the United Nations would be headquartered. He did not want it to be in New York. He argued that, if the building had to be near New York, it should be located outside any of its boroughs, in someplace like Westchester County, or in Connecticut. The Rockefeller family and Robert Moses combined forces to successfully override Le Corbusier's desires and get the U.N. built in Manhattan.

The building's appearance as a sheer slab of glass -- a totally new form -- was extreme even for the radical architect Le Corbusier. It was all glass facing east and west, with no windows facing north and south; its orientation was based on the rising and setting of the sun rather than on the grid of the city. The building that housed the U.N. Assembly had a swooping roof with a line so strong that the building had to be placed in a park set away from the street, to avoid the harsh sculptural clash it would have made with the lines of the city. The strong pure geometric lines of the Trylon and the Perisphere at the 1939 World's Fair had hinted at this new kind of building, but until that time no functional structure had come close to the United Nations Headquarters in its departure from traditional urban forms.