1933 - Architecture, Real Estate

Architecture, Real Estate

New York's 70-story RCA Building (GE Building beginning in 1990) opens in May at 30 Rockefeller Plaza as Rockefeller Center construction proceeds under the direction of Reinhard and Hoffmeister, Corbet Harrison and MacMurray, and Hood and Fouilhoux, who will design all the Rockefeller Center buildings put up in this decade. The small British building opens in May, La Maison Française in September, both on Fifth Avenue.

Congress establishes the Home Owners Loan Corp. (HOLC) June 13 as mortgage foreclosures average 1,000 per day (see 1932). HOLC will grant emergency loans of more than $4 billion in the next 4 years to avert foreclosures.

Sheraton Corp. of America has its beginnings at Cambridge, Mass., where Boston entrepreneur Ernest Henderson, 36, and his Harvard classmate Robert Lowell Moore take over the Continental Hotel that opened the day the stock market crashed in 1929. By 1937 Henderson and Moore will have bought up stock for as little as 50¢ a share in Standard Investing Corp., used the firm's capital to finance acquisitions that include a small Boston residential hotel called the Sheraton despite its Hepplewhite decor, and used the name Sheraton to identify all their properties.

Architect Adolf Loos dies at Kalksburg outside Vienna August 23 at age 62; Addison Mizner has died of heart disease at Palm Beach February 5 at age 60, having created $50 million worth of flamboyant structures for jaded millionaires.