The sunken rink at the foot of the Channel Gardens, Prometheus in gold over the fountain, forty flags going round the parapet, skaters below and a Norway spruce above them with fifty thousand lights on it. The New Yorkers hang along the shop fronts of the Channel Gardens, between the wire angels, and down on the rink level either side of the fountain.
The first tree at Rockefeller Center was a 20 foot balsam fir put up on Christmas Eve 1931 by the men building the complex, decorated with strings of cranberries, garlands of paper and a few tin cans. The first official tree, 50 feet tall, was lit in 1933, and the skating rink opened in the sunken plaza below it in 1936. The tree is usually a Norway spruce of 69 to 100 feet carrying about 50,000 LED lights; the tallest, in 1999, was a 100 foot spruce from Killingworth, Connecticut. The star placed in 2018 has 70 spikes and three million crystals and weighs 900 pounds. The tree is lit on the Wednesday after Thanksgiving, and since 2007 each one has been milled into lumber for Habitat for Humanity.
Source · Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree, Wikipedia ↗
The Channel Gardens sloping down from Fifth Avenue between the British Empire Building and La Maison Francaise, the trumpeting wire angels, the sunken rink with its flags and skaters, Paul Manship's gilded Prometheus and the fountain, the Christmas tree with its star, and 30 Rockefeller Plaza rising behind it. Mood: december, seven in the evening. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.