The Rockefeller Touch

As a ceremonial flight of helicopters buzzed overhead, the world's largest bank building officially opened for business last week in New York. Almost everything about the Chase Manhattan Bank's new 60-story glass and aluminum headquarters is the biggest: it has the biggest bank vault in the biggest underground banking area, the biggest automated check-sorting operation, the biggest air-conditioning unit. Even its 8,800 windows are oversized, "so people can look in and see bankers and so bankers can look out."

The brainchild of Chase Manhattan's personable president, David Rockefeller, 45, the new building unmistakably bears the Rockefeller touch. To decorate it, Rockefeller sparked the purchase of $500,000 worth of art, ranging from African primitives to a rectangle of muted colors by Abstractionist Kenzo Okada. In Rockefeller's private washroom hangs a color lithograph by Cezanne.

A Rockefeller tradition is also evident in the building's location: when consolidation of nine different Chase offices into one building was first considered, many Chase executives favored a move to midtown Manhattan. But Rockefeller argued for the island's rundown southern tip, set a hopeful trend for New York's congested financial district by insisting that two-thirds of his bank's two-block site must be given over to a tree-lined plaza. Between the new Chase Bank and other renewal projects for which he is pressing (the chief one: a world trade center on the East River), David Rockefeller may yet do for lower Manhattan what his father, John D. Jr., did for the midtown with Rockefeller Center.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.