Rockefeller Center

NBC is here, as is a tiny but famous skating rink. You may have seen it on TV? Read about it in Catcher in the Rye?

Stay away! It's filled with endless lines of tourists hoping (futilely) to get into a taping of Conan.

Columbia connection

Legend states that Rockefeller Center was built atop what was Columbia's second campus. This is only partially correct. Columbia's campus from the 1830s to the 1890s was indeed located in Midtown, but it was further east, near Madison Avenue. Columbia, however, did own the land on which Rockefeller Center was developed, and continued to reap rents from it well into the 1980s, when it was sold to the Japanese for some exorbitant figure, and helped boost the university's endowment.

We should have held on to it until the peak of the 1990s boom!