Building: Rockefeller Center West

In 35 years, nobody has built anything quite like Manhattan's Rockefeller Center, the world's largest privately owned business-and-entertainment center. With its labyrinth of underground shopping arcades, sunken plaza, theaters, television studios, 25 restaurants, 70 retail stores and 50,000 daytime inhabitants of 16 slab-sided office buildings, it remains the quintessence of skyscraper civilization. Last week a combine including two Rockefeller brothers —President David of New York City's Chase Manhattan Bank and Governor Winthrop of Arkansas—brought forth plans to build a similar, if smaller, office-hotel-and-cultural complex a continent away, close to the...