The United Nations Headquarters and the Slaughterhouse It Replaced

The sleek glass slab rising ahead along the river is the United Nations headquarters, and the ground it stands on was once a strip of slaughterhouses and tenements that nobody particularly wanted, until one of the richest men in America decided to give it away.

When the United Nations was founded after the Second World War, it needed a permanent home, and for a while New York was not the obvious choice. Planners seriously considered sites near Philadelphia, close to Independence Hall, as well as locations in Westchester County and in Flushing Meadows in Queens. None of those plans came together. Then, in the final weeks of nineteen forty six, John Davison Rockefeller Junior stepped in and offered eight and a half million dollars to buy a stretch of East River waterfront in Manhattan known as Turtle Bay. His son Nelson Rockefeller had quietly secured an option on the property from a private developer, and the family donated the entire site to the United Nations that December.

Construction began in nineteen forty eight under an international board of architects led by Wallace Harrison, with major contributions from the French architect Le Corbusier and the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, whose design became the basis for the final plan. The headquarters, with its Secretariat tower and distinctive General Assembly hall, was declared complete in October of nineteen fifty two and has hosted nearly every major diplomatic gathering since. The site carries a special status today, administered under the United Nations' own rules even though it remains subject to United States law overall, a hybrid arrangement unlike almost any other property in the city.

All of it happens on a patch of Manhattan riverfront that slaughterhouses once occupied, until one family's gift changed its future for good.