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 back to the Rockefellers, which provided seed funding for Columbia's endowment.

It is generally acknowledged that President Rupp made a good decision to sell Rockefeller Center for $400 million in the 1980s. The volatile real-estate market for the next decade swung the value of the property to as low as $75 million, and it would not reach $400 million again until the late 1990s. In the meantime, with cash proceeds coming from the sale, Columbia's endowment portfolio grew at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17%. Compare that with the approximately $3 million in rent that Rockefeller Center generated yearly.