By Jared Ebersole in Video — 25 Feb 2026

The Tiny Holdouts Rockefeller Center Had to Build Around

Rockefeller Center looks like a master plan, but two small buildings on Sixth Avenue show where the plan lost.

Rockefeller Center looks like it was drawn in one clean gesture.

Then you notice the two little buildings on Sixth Avenue.

They sit like leftover teeth at the base of a giant Art Deco machine, one near West 49th Street and one near West 50th. They are easy to miss because 30 Rock is so huge. But once you see them, the whole master plan changes. Rockefeller Center was not simply built. It was negotiated, bought, resisted, and in two places, forced to bend.

Where it is

The two visible holdouts flank 30 Rockefeller Plaza along Sixth Avenue: Pebble Bar occupies the former Hurley's building near 1240 Avenue of the Americas, and Warby Parker is at 1258 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

The project began with John D. Rockefeller Jr. trying to turn a difficult moment into a permanent institution. In the late 1920s, the Metropolitan Opera was considering a move uptown. Rockefeller leased land from Columbia University and imagined a new cultural and commercial district: opera house, offices, theaters, shops, restaurants, and enough rent to pay for the whole thing.

Then the market collapsed.

The Great Depression changed the stakes. The Met plan fell apart, but Rockefeller kept going. In a city desperate for jobs, the construction of Rockefeller Center became both a real estate gamble and a public-relations answer to the Rockefeller family name. Tens of thousands of people would eventually work on the complex. The project promised order, employment, and modernity at a time when the city badly needed all three.

To build it, Rockefeller's team had to assemble a huge site between Fifth and Sixth avenues and 48th and 51st streets. That meant buying out leases, clearing older buildings, and making the messy west side of Midtown behave like a single development parcel.

Most people sold.

Two did not.

The better-known holdout was Hurley's, a saloon in a nineteenth-century townhouse at Sixth Avenue and 49th Street. The bar's roots went back to the 1890s, when Paddy Daly, Daniel Hurley, and Connie Hurley leased the building and opened a pub. During Prohibition, the place reportedly kept operating as a speakeasy through a rear entrance. By the time Rockefeller's agents came through, Hurley's had a long lease and leverage.

Rockefeller could buy the building. He could not simply erase the lease.

According to later accounts, the Hurley and Daly interests demanded $250,000 to give up their position, an enormous sum in Depression-era New York. Rockefeller refused. The tower was built around them.

The second holdout stood at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 50th Street. Historical accounts differ in the details and even in the owner's name, but the basic story is the same: a small grocer's building resisted the buyout long enough that the Rockefeller plan had to accommodate it too. Today that corner is associated with Warby Parker.

These buildings are often described as stubborn curiosities, but they reveal something bigger about the city. Even the most powerful developer in America could not turn Midtown into a blank sheet of paper. Existing leases, property rights, family businesses, neighborhood institutions, and sheer refusal all had weight.

That is why the holdouts are so satisfying. They interrupt the myth of total control.

Rockefeller Center is one of the most successful private urban developments ever built. It has towers, plazas, underground concourses, theaters, art, broadcast studios, and a Christmas tree seen around the world. Yet the little buildings on Sixth Avenue are still there, quietly proving that New York is not only made by capital. It is also made by friction.

The result is better because of it.

Without the holdouts, Sixth Avenue would read as another clean corporate edge. With them, the block has a visible scar of negotiation. You can see the old city refusing to disappear entirely under the new one.

Rockefeller bought almost everything he needed.

Almost.