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The original Christmas tree erected by workers at Rockefeller Center in 1931. (Courtesy of Rockefeller Archive Center)
The Rockefeller Christmas Tree Belongs To The Working Class
Construction workers pooled their wages to erect the first Rockefeller Center Christmas tree in 1931, bringing holiday cheer to themselves on the job site. Their billionaire bosses co-opted the gesture, transforming it into today’s consumer spectacle.
The original Christmas tree erected by workers at Rockefeller Center in 1931. (Courtesy of Rockefeller Archive Center)
Each holiday season, an estimated 125 million people make the pilgrimage to Rockefeller Center in New York City to catch a glimpse of the iconic Christmas tree. Having just made the journey ourselves, we can tell you that wading through the near-impenetrable wall of tourists, holiday shoppers, and tree-gazers descending upon Midtown Manhattan feels more like a punishment for not having made it onto the nice list. For those who choose to fight the Bah Humbugs and brave the crowds and cold in pursuit of some holiday spirit, the reward is a frankly uninspired tree housed within a metal barrier, which you can view through the throngs of families taking selfies from forty feet away.
If that doesn’t sound appealing, the tree lighting ceremony began airing on NBC in 1997, and you can gawk at the tree from home through the screen of your choosing. Now a show of unabashed opulence, the nationally televised event features performances from pop stars alongside presenters and commentators. This most recent ceremony was hosted by Kelly Clarkson and featured performances by Jennifer Hudson, the Backstreet Boys, Raye, Thalía, and the Rockettes. NBC favorites Hoda Kotb, Al Roker, and Savannah Guthrie also stopped by during the broadcast.
Though the spectacle holds all of the standard markers of a production produced by and for capitalism — not least because it bears the name of America’s first billionaire family — its origins are quite the opposite. The very first Christmas tree erected in Rockefeller Center was actually a gift from working people to themselves.
On Christmas Eve of 1931, Italian American construction workers building out New York City’s Rockefeller Center put up a twenty-foot evergreen tree in the middle of their job site. Despite this being the height of the Great Depression — which saw an estimated 64 percent of construction workers unemployed — the workers pooled their resources to purchase this first tree. It was a financial stretch for workers whose weekly wages fell around $20 to $25 (or $400 to $500 in today’s dollars).
Unlike this year’s seventy-four-foot-tall tree, wrapped in fifty thousand LED lights and crowned with a nine-hundred-pound, three-million-crystal Swarovski monstrosity, the workers’ tree was dressed in paper garlands, strings of cranberries, and tin cans provided by their families. One photo remains of the workers gathered in front of their tree. They’re in line waiting to be paid by their employers, watching in their workwear as a man in a coat and top hat walks by.
The difficult times weren’t shared by all. By the time this photo was taken, John D. Rockefeller was already retired, with a net worth between $1.5 billion and $2 billion ($34.5 to $46 billion today). “Good times are coming!” he’s said to have exclaimed to the 130 guests attending the annual Christmas party at his Florida estate just days after the workers put up their tree. As chief officer of the capitalist class of his day, he was optimistic that yet more riches were on the horizon.
It’s said that the Rockefeller family liked the workers’ tree so much that they slapped their name on it, and in 1933, a New York City holiday tradition was born. When the Rockefellers took over, the twenty-foot tree with the makeshift spirit of Charlie Brown was replaced by a statelier fifty-foot tree. Each subsequent tree has sought to outdo the grandeur (or tastelessness, depending on your view) of the last, with an aesthetic increasingly unmoored from the original sentiment behind the tree. By the 1950s, scaffolding was required to decorate the tree. The task has since ballooned into a multiday job requiring hundreds of workers and a crane to erect and dress.
How the Bosses Stole Christmas
Nearly a century later, the tree has become an emblem of corporate largesse and luxury consumerism. The original billionaire owners of the tree, the Rockerfellers, have been replaced by a private real estate investment firm (Tishman Speyer) in concert with yet another family of billionaires (the Crown family). The story of the firm’s recent rise in dominance mirrors that of the Rockefeller Christmas tree itself. Both stories involve capitalists staking their claim on something that once belonged to ordinary New Yorkers, making a buck by making it worse.
Since Rockefeller’s time, asset managers like Tishman Speyer have come to dominate the financial scene. The rise — and folly — of asset management firms has been well documented in Jacobin here and here and here. Differing from the investment schemes of old, the game for asset management firms has shifted from run-of-the-mill sleazy stock and bond investments to material assets. (Think BlackRock, which, in another tragic blow to Christmas, owns a small share in Charlie Brown’s Peanuts copyright.)
If you’ve heard of Tishman Speyer at all, it’s likely from their real estate hijinks. Holding assets isn’t part of the long-term plan for asset managers, but if you can bake in a consistent, appreciating flow of revenue while waiting to cash out, all the better. High investment can mean high reward — and that’s exactly what Tishman Speyer tried to do after purchasing the Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town properties in Midtown Manhattan.
Once a postwar haven for the middle class, the former property owners, Met Life Insurance Company, put the entire community up for sale in 2005. Tishman Speyer and top-of-the-naughty-list ghoul BlackRock purchased the properties for a whopping $5.4 billion the following year — outbidding the tenants’ association, who, led by city council member Daniel Garodnick, were attempting to purchase their homes and apartments.
The following year, Tishman Speyer was named in a lawsuit brought by the tenants’ association accusing the firm of illegally raising rents across the two properties. Drowning in debt after purchasing the properties for billions under the assumption that it would be able to raise the rent to market prices over a short time period, the firm defaulted on its mortgage (the largest commercial mortgage default in the United States). It surrendered the property back to its lenders in 2010. In summary, Tishman Speyer outbid the tenants looking to stay in their homes forever, made them a worse product, and sold that worse product back to tenants for a premium or forced them from their homes before exiting completely.
The effects of Tishman Speyer’s speculation extend far beyond people whose homes and apartments are tied up in asset management schemes. During the height of the pandemic in 2020, Tishman Speyer is reported to have spent $12 billion acquiring commercial properties, betting big on a mass return to the office. “What I believe with strong conviction is that offices will be a critical ingredient in the workplace equation,” the CEO told the business publication Pere in a piece from October 2021, adding that “virtually every CEO I talk to agrees with that premise.”
If Tishman Speyer gets its way, working people granted the small luxury of working remotely or on a hybrid schedule will find themselves permanently parked back in their office chairs. But hey, they may get a chance to stroll through the luxury shops around the Rockefeller tree come Christmastime.
Lest one think these companies are all bad, they make the occasional low-effort and self-promotional foray into charity. In 2021, while the NFT craze was still in full swing, Tishman Speyer auctioned off a simplistic, animated illustration of that year’s Christmas tree as a non-fungible token (NFT). After minimal interest, the NFT sold for a single Ethereum and the proceeds went to Habitat for Humanity.
If a cheap NFT reproduction of the Rockefeller Christmas tree doesn’t suit your holiday needs, you can also purchase a litany of tree-themed consumer products: T-shirts, hats, ornaments, a Roxy the Owl–themed puzzle (Roxy was a critically dehydrated owl found in the tree after it was delivered one year), and commemorative ornaments modeled after Lunch atop a Skyscraper — the famous photo of ironworkers lunching on a beam taken in late 1932 during the construction of 30 Rockefeller Center.
The image was not a casual snapshot: the Rockefellers had hired a photographer to pose the workers as a way of promoting the skyscraper. An attraction based on the famous photograph, which allows tourists to recreate the scene, opened on the observation deck of Rockefeller Center last year.
Like Lunch atop a Skyscraper, the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree is an appropriated bit of working-class life plucked out of context and used to promote their employers. The tree has the added distinction of having been stripped of the meaning that originally animated the gesture. The People’s Tree began as both a symbol of solidarity and a small slice of holiday joy for the families of workers who spent Christmas Eve of 1931 building retail and office space. These Depression-era workers couldn’t have known they were also gifting their employer a timeless and invaluable cultural asset that would serve to attract — and siphon money from — future generations of working families.
As we celebrate the holidays this season, let the tree at Rockefeller Center be a seventy-four-foot reminder that value is only created by the workers. All billionaires can do is steal it and wrap it in plastic.
