It’s been a warm week for March so far, even warm enough last night before bed to crack the window a bit and listen to the strong winds and occasional rain showers. Did that account for the occurrence of one of my semiannual phantasmagoria dreams early this morning? Maybe.

Great Fortune, subtitled “The Epic of Rockefeller Center,” by Daniel Okrent (2003) is a delightful book so far, and I’m only a chapter in. Certainly the most delightful thing I’ve ever read about a major urban mixed-use redevelopment project.

The first chapter sets up the story nicely, telling a short history of the Manhattan land that would be Rockefeller Center up until the time that John D. Rockefeller Jr. got involved in the project in the late 1920s. I didn’t know that the parcel had belonged to Columbia University for many years, and the scheme to redevelop the land (known as the Upper Estate) was ultimately driven by the university’s need to pay for its stately campus in Morningside Heights.

“… this meant that expansion on the grand scale of McKim, Mead & White’s Olympian campus on Morningside Heights had somehow to be financed, and the Upper Estate was the only cash cow in sight,” Okrent writes. “The milking commenced in 1904…”

An important person at the beginning of the story is Otto Kahn, multimillionaire financier and patron of the arts (an American Maecenas, back when educated people would have known that reference), who was president and chairman of the board of directors of the Metropolitan Opera. I didn’t know that he was well enough known that the Marx Brothers parodied him as Roscoe W. Chandler in Animal Crackers.

A digression. Apparently, for $200, one can own an original Otto Kahn letter. Then again, they aren’t rare. Okrent called his correspondence “oceanic.”

Okrent also writes some good standalone lines: “His [architect Ben Morris] neo-Georgian Union League Club on 37th and Park is probably as close as one can get to the architectural equivalent of a stuffed shirt.”

The other day, I was driving along with Ann and playing with the radio dial as we went. On came “Copacabana.” Hadn’t heard that song a good while, but as I mentioned to Ann, it seemed to be on the radio all the time in 1978.

I thought a bit about it, and it seems remarkable that such a downer of a song was so popular. As a ballad, the entire story is, a woman’s boyfriend is killed in front of her, and psychologically she never recovers.

“Yeah,” Ann said. “But the music is so peppy.”

True enough. There’s also a derivative short story in there somewhere. Maybe the incident and the aftermath from the point of view of Rico. Maybe he was the playboy son of a Fulgencio Batista crony. In his highly publicized murder trial in New York in 1949, his lawyers argued self-defense and he was acquitted.

While walking the dog at Fabbrini Park this week, I noticed a memorial plaque on a bench honoring a man named William “Mr. Bill” X (I forget the last name). Nicknamed Mr. Bill, eh? And what were his last words? Oh Noooooooooooooo!

Of course, like Wile E. Coyote, Mr. Bill couldn’t actually die, just suffer endlessly, which seems a lot more hellish. Still, we celebrate the likes of Mr. Bill. I used to have a Mr. Bill t-shirt, and have photographic evidence to prove it, in as much as photographs prove anything anymore. It’s among the t-shirts I’ve lost over the years, which also includes the Kill ‘Em All, Let God Sort It Out shirt that sported a black beret-wearing skull.