Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [69]
In early 1946, the General Assembly voted to move the UN from London to New York City until its permanent home in the suburbs was ready. In the summer, the Security Council began meeting in a gymnasium on the campus of Hunter College, a women’s school in the Bronx. Meanwhile, Westchester and Fairfield were having second thoughts about hosting the organization. “A lot of homeowners … got alarmed about the idea of all these foreigners with diplomatic immunity tearing around, running over their children, and having property that couldn’t be taxed,” recalled Isaac Stokes, an American diplomat posted to the UN at the time. In a referendum, Greenwich residents voted 5,505 to 2,019 against hosting the UN. The General Assembly abandoned the “international D.C.” idea and reopened the search for a home. That fall, with classes about to resume at Hunter College, the Security Council was forced to move into an abandoned war factory on Long Island.
With Westchester and Fairfield now out of the running, cities began to furiously compete for the honor (and lucre) of hosting the UN, much as cities compete for the Olympics or the Super Bowl today. Isaac Stokes was the unlucky diplomat assigned to field calls from cities convinced “they had ‘the place’ for the United Nations.” “I remember Virginia Beach coming in,” said Stokes (though he may have meant to say Richmond).
Well, the first thing I said to them was, “You’ve got to face one fact. There are black members in the U.N.” I guess at that point there were only two, Haiti and Ethiopia. But there were some very dark Indians and so on. They obviously had second thoughts after that.
Ultimately four cities were chosen as finalists: Boston, San Francisco, New York, and Philadelphia. The Soviets vetoed Boston because the city’s Roman Catholic Archbishop, Richard J. Cushing, was a vocal critic of their “Godless” regime. European countries opposed San Francisco because it was too far afield. That left Philadelphia and New York, and, for a time, the leading contender was the City of Brotherly Love. “They had done all their homework,” remembered Isaac Stokes. “They were prepared to offer practically the entire Fairmount Park … to the UN.”
Enter William Zeckendorf Sr., a real estate developer who had recently purchased seventeen acres overlooking the East River in midtown Manhattan for nearly ten million dollars. It was a run-down area of slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants that Zeckendorf planned to turn into a business park to rival Rockefeller Center. Then, on the morning of Friday, December 6, 1946, Zeckendorf read an article in the New York Times about the likelihood that New York would lose the United Nations. The developer called Mayor William O’Dwyer and told him the UN could have the land he’d purchased “for any price they wish to pay.” O’Dwyer summoned Robert Moses, who called Nelson Rockefeller, who called his father, John D. Rockefeller. The elder Rockefeller, who wasn’t crazy about Rockefeller Center facing competition from Zeckendorf’s development anyway, agreed to give the UN $8.5 million to buy the property. The catch, according to Isaac Stokes, was that Congress had to pass a law allowing him to claim the donation as a tax deduction, since contributions to international organizations were not deductible. The law got passed and Rockefeller gave the money to the UN, which bought the land from Zeckendorf, who took a loss on the deal but rescued the organization from Philadelphia.
President Truman convinced Congress to loan the UN sixty-five million dollars, interest-free, to pay for construction of the organization’s headquarters. (The loan was paid off, on time, in 1982.) Truman himself laid the cornerstone on United