Word: rothafel
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...with Diego Rivera, the Mexican artist whose mural for the lobby of the RCA Building--a dreadful kitsch effulgence, by the way--was demolished on Nelson's orders after Rivera slipped in a portrait of Lenin. Okrent is also supremely funny on the subject of S.L. (Roxy) Rothafel, creator of superabundant picture palaces along Broadway, those Moorish-boorish Odeons, who was the man chosen to guide development of Radio City Music Hall. Once he was in the job, fate teamed Roxy with Deskey--Donald Deskey, the great evangel of Art Deco who had won a competition to design the Music...
...Music Hall had three sires--John D. Rockefeller Jr., son of the world's richest man, whose eponymous Depression-defying venture in urban optimism was the greatest accomplishment of his life; S.L. ("Roxy") Rothafel, a monomaniacal showman whose idea of appropriate scale ranged from enormous to gargantuan; and Donald Deskey, a design buccaneer whose best-known work, eclipsing even the Music Hall, would be the Crest toothpaste tube. But what these three unlikely collaborators built, and what renovation architect Hugh Hardy and his colleagues at Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates have now reinvigorated, changed the course of American interior design...
...furniture pieces in novel forms and added new materials--tubular steel, Bakelite, aluminum foil--to the design vocabulary. Up to that point, the fashion in theater decoration might have been characterized as Italian Baroque Moorish Greek Renaissance Pagoda. Pick any two, and you had a movie palace. Deskey resisted Rothafel's bludgeoning insistence on "Portuguese Rococo" and instead dressed the place for Fred and Ginger, crafting a sleek temple dedicated not to Old World solemnity but to machine-age speed and sheen...
...grey pylon which strikes the earth where Manhattan's Sixth Avenue Elevated fences off 50th and 51st Streets-the Radio City Music Hall of Rockefeller Center. Wags had already dubbed the locale of the new theatre, whose 6,200 seats make it the world's largest, the "Rothafeller" Center, for celebrated Showman Samuel Lionel ("Roxy") Rothafel was to produce this week a monster variety bill twice daily...
...Americans that there was no bigness like show bigness. Something preposterously grand about the Music Hall raised it above its nearby (and now nearly forgotten) movie-palace rivals, like the Roxy or the Paramount: its scale, its colossal adornments, its dizzying spaciousness. Its founding impresario, the late S.L. ("Roxy") Rothafel, loved to boast that it was the largest indoor theater in the world...