» On 2/27/2024 03:50:00 AM Mountain Standard Time, Alan wrote:
Roof Garden Hijinx @ 30 Rock Plaza. 

"Second Stay, Roof Garden, Pass It On." [NBC Pages in NYC worked Saturday Night Live in shifts. Sort of. Second Stay meant you were required to stay in the studio for the last half of SNL. Everybody else had to clear out and find some sort of trouble to get into. I can't remember if it was only the supervisory Key Pages who smoked certain substances in the roof garden during the live broadcast. 😉]

The five gardens on Rockefeller Center's building rooftops were part of architect Raymond Hood's original 1930 scheme. Landscape architect Ralph Hancock was hired in 1934 to design the garden on 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The 3/4-acre garden included a bird sanctuary, vegetable garden, rock garden, a children's garden, and the Gardens of the Nations. Over 400 visitors attended the opening day on April 15, 1935. About 87,000 people visited the garden during the next eight months. The entry fee was one dollar, but later went down to forty cents. The "International Garden," a rock garden in the center of the themed gardens, featured a meandering stream and 2,000 plant varieties. The 11th-floor garden was staffed by hostesses who wore costumes, and the plantings lit up at night. When public interest waned, most of the garden was demolished by 1938, and the rock garden was left to dry up, supplanted by flower beds.

30 Rock's roof garden is accessible only to NBC employees, via a not-so-secret stairway. Legend has it that cannabis products were consumed at this location, just after midnight on three Saturday nights per month. Rockefeller Center was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1987.

SNL promos shot in the roof garden, 5/2014, Kenan Thompson & Andy Samberg: YouTube.com/watch?v=Sfgrb_rMQ2s

3/4 acre = 56.7% of a football field, including the end zone 🏈:

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