New York Breaks Ground for the United Nations

On September 14, 1948, workers broke ground on the East River site for the Secretariat Building, the 39-story tower that would anchor the permanent home of the United Nations. The land under it had been Turtle Bay, a working Manhattan waterfront of slaughterhouses, tenements, and the old Eberhard Faber Pencil Factory, until John D. Rockefeller Jr. put up 8.5 million dollars in December 1946 to buy roughly 17 acres of it and hand the deed to the UN. The city spent millions more clearing the site before a single foundation could go in. Planning director Wallace Harrison led an international team of architects, including Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer, in designing the complex, and the Secretariat's basement work that began that September day was the first physical step toward a building that opened its doors within a few years.