The First Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree

On Christmas Eve 1931, in the middle of the excavation site that would become Rockefeller Center, Italian, Greek, and Irish American construction workers put up a 20-foot balsam fir. They had pooled their own money to buy one of the season's surplus trees, and they decorated it themselves with strings of cranberries, paper garlands, and tin cans, since there was no budget and no plan for anything fancier. The tree was never wired for lights. Instead, the foreman set up a small table underneath it and used it to hand out paychecks before the men went home for the holiday, close to 40,000 people were on the Rockefeller Center payroll that year, most of them simply grateful to have work at all. Two years later, in 1933, the site's developers lit an official 50-foot tree and turned the idea into an annual event, but the first tree belonged entirely to the workers.