By the 1940s, most critics had positive views of Rockefeller Center. Even Mumford praised the complex, lamenting in 1947 that the new headquarters of the United Nations on First Avenue had no "human scale" or "transition from the intimate to the monumental", whereas Rockefeller Center's buildings "produce an aesthetic effect out of all proportion to their size". Haskell wrote in 1966 that Rockefeller Center's designers "seemed to have regarded urban life as an enhanceable romance". In 1969, the art historian Vincent Scully wrote, "Rockefeller Center is one of the few surviving public spaces that look as if they were designed and used by people who knew what stable wealth was and were not ashamed to enjoy it." The New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation commissioned a report in 1974 entitled "Grand Central Terminal and Rockefeller Center: A Historic-Critical Estimate of Their Significance", in which they concluded that Rockefeller Center, along with Central Park and Grand Central Terminal, were the only three developments that could slow down Manhattan's "remorseless process of expansion and decay". In 1976, New York Times architectural critic Paul Goldberger wrote, "What makes Rockefeller Center work is that it is at once a formal Beaux‐Arts‐influenced complex of dignified towers and a lively, utterly contemporary amalgam of shops, plazas and street life. It is as natural a home for a 1970's street festival as for a 1930's movie about cafe society: few designs can join such disparate worlds so comfortably."
