When NBC brought The Tonight Show back to New York last year, with Jimmy Fallon as its new host, the network faced a curious problem—what to do with all the live-audience members before they entered the television studio at Rockefeller Center. For now, they line up in the hallways, but beginning June 1, they will be ushered into a reconstructed 14,000-square-foot Art Deco mezzanine and rotunda at the heart of the building.
Originally designed in the 1930s to welcome audiences attending RCA radio shows, the space had been demolished in the late 1970s to make way for more mundane functions. “It had been a conference center, with a section used for a shipping and receiving room, and some edit booths,” says John Wallace, president of operations and technical services at NBCUniversal. When he and his staff stumbled upon photos of the original rotunda, he says, “it was hard to imagine what was here.”
The company hired Gabellini Sheppard Associates to bring it back to life while updating it for today. “This is a facsimile of the original space with some contemporary flourishes,” says partner Michael Gabellini, noting that his team dug deep into archives for plans, photos, and renderings of the original space.
The grand, re-created rotunda is reached by a 16-foot-wide carpeted staircase with walls clad in Greek travertine, beneath a white-gold-leaf light feature inspired by concentric rings of rippling water. The most notable update is the art: Where the original rotunda featured a mural of photographs by Margaret Bourke-White, the new one has video screens with a rotating display of images (including Bourke-White’s photos).
But in some cases, Gabellini’s version is even truer to the original design than the previous space. The scalloped shape of the bronze cladding around four massive columns was included in the earliest 1930s renderings but hadn’t previously been built. “We took some license,” says Gabellini, “to be an arbiter.”
The space will also eventually be used for guests attending Saturday Night Live, Late Night with Seth Meyers, and The Meredith Vieira Show.
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