Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree: How a Workers' Whip-Round Started It

The Rockefeller CenterRockefeller CenterThe Art Deco complex hosting the winter ice rink, Christmas tree, Radio City and NBC studios. Christmas tree began in 1931, when construction workers building the complex pooled their own money for a 20-foot balsam fir and hung garlands their families had made. A formal lighting ceremony arrived in 1933. Today's tree is usually a 69-to-100-foot Norway spruce with roughly 50,000 LED lights, raised each November.

A whip-round, not a marketing plan

In 1931, Rockefeller Center was a construction site and the country was in the depths of the Great Depression. The workers building the complex pooled their own money to buy a 20-foot balsam fir, then decorated it with handmade garlands their families had made. Nobody commissioned it. No committee approved it, and no agency pitched it. It was an improvised gesture by the people pouring the concrete, standing in the middle of a half-finished building site in the worst economic stretch of American life. The tree cost them wages they could have kept. Two years later, in 1933, the first formal lighting ceremony followed, but by then the tradition had already started itself, from the ground up.

From 20 feet to 100

The scale changed, the impulse did not. Today the tree in the plaza is typically a Norway spruce between 69 and 100 feet tall, carrying roughly 50,000 LED lights, raised each November ahead of a late-November lighting. The garlands strung in 1931 were made by hand at kitchen tables, the ceremony added in 1933 turned a private gesture into a public one. A Depression-era fir bought with pooled wages and a modern spruce wired with LEDs are the same idea at different sizes: the tree is a gift from the people who were there. That origin is why the Rockefeller Center tree lands as civic rather than corporate, even though the plaza around it was built by a corporation. Every December, thousands of people who have never heard the 1931 story stand in roughly the same spot and look up.

Seeing it in person

The tree is raised in November and lit in late November, the official Rockefeller Center page is where to confirm the season's ceremony details before building a trip around it. For the view, come in from Fifth Avenue through the Channel Gardens, which lines the tree up between the flags and the rink, the plaza itself, closer to the ice, gives the straight-on angle. Early mornings and late evenings thin the crowds. Grand Central TerminalGrand Central TerminalThe 1913 Beaux-Arts rail terminal with the turquoise zodiac ceiling, whispering gallery and oyster bar. is roughly a 15-minute walk south, and Central ParkCentral ParkThe 843-acre engineered wilderness at Manhattan's heart, designed by Olmsted and Vaux in 1858. is a short walk north along Fifth Avenue if you want to stretch the evening.

If you would rather have the context delivered than pieced together, a guided Midtown holiday-lights walk that finishes at the tree, from $35 (estimated), covers the windows, the plaza and the 1931 story in about two hours. Traveler reviews on the activity page are the fastest check on whether a given departure time fits your night.

More on the place itself: rockefeller center.