The FDR Post Office: Nelson Rockefeller would have loved this place...

I still remember Governor Nelson Rockefeller very well. He was a large, sort of ham handed man with a very bearish mien and affected a growly, sort of working class accent when speaking in public.. he addressed everyone as "guy" and  "fella." ....it would be very easy to imagine him wearing a hard hat.

And he did often wear a hard hat, because he had moved beyond what a lot of us (myself included) love doing as children--building model skyscrapers and the like and of course the proverbial sand castles if we ever got on a beach for any length of time...he had moved to the position of actually ordering the construction of all kinds of buildings, the larger the better.

The "brutalist" modern style was his favorite. 

His public spaces always involved these big windswept open plazas, without trees or benches to sit on. 

He had a wife named Happy, which was rather ironic because he was a notorious philanderer...he died in the arms of one of his mistresses, of  a heart attack, in the midst of passion. There was a song at the time people still played called "What a Way to Go"...I think I heard some radio disc jockey had played that when the announcement of the whole story of Nelson's demise was broadcast...

David Rockefeller was something completely different. He must have inherited all of John D.'s Scrooge McDuck preferences and mannerisms. He was happy running a big bank and going to business luncheons, which is where I heard him speak twice. He looked oddly like the kind of person who might collect stamps as a hobby. He was more of a top hat than a hard hat man.

If there was a typical family resemblance lurking there, it was hard to see...I wonder what it would have been like if they had traded places and Nelson had run the bank and David had supervised the buildings. No, that is too big a stretch of the imagination, even for me...

I speak of David in the past tense, but I understand he is still with us...the survivor of five siblings.

Here is a video of him with Charlie Rose, talking about the World Trade Center

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL_iC-RL_lY