Meaning the former dead-end plaza was integrated with the flow of the city.

It’s a miraculous place. Like a moment’s pause. Half a block away from the city’s main thoroughfare, with benches where you can stop and sit, and plantings in front of the RCA Building, you feel you’re in Midtown and also apart from it.

You haven’t talked about 30 Rock, or the RCA Building.

I still call it the RCA Building. Can’t help myself. Alice B. Toklas, who visited with Stein, said something like, it’s not the way it goes up into the air, it’s how it comes out of the ground. It rises with an almost physical energy. Hood used the tops of elevator banks as setbacks to let as much light into the office spaces as possible and used the tops of the larger setbacks for gardens. Todd figured tenants would pay another dollar per square foot to have garden access, so he was very happy to let Hood design them.

I like to walk west on 49th Street, around the corner, to the south entrance of the RCA Building, which is decorated with Leo Friedlander’s Art Deco nudes. Junior’s office was on the 56th floor of the RCA building. It was styled like an 18th-century English baronial mansion. His tastes were conservative. He detested the Friedlander nudes here and also the ones on the 50th Street side of the building so much that he refused to enter the building through those doors. But, significantly, he also never ordered the sculptures to be removed. He saw art as a public service. If we continue west on 49th Street, cross Sixth Avenue and then look back up at the third floor of the RCA Building (you don’t really get a clear view otherwise) we can find four bas-reliefs, carved in stone, still hard to see but striking, also by Lachaise. You might well ask, “What are they doing all the way up there?”