Intelligence awakening mankind

That seems a suitable enough message for a conference, no?  Particularly the people on the left going down into a fiery inferno labelled Ignorance.  This is a section of the elaborate mosaics above the entrance to the Rockefeller Center, called Intelligence Awakening Mankind - which I've taken on board as being there, but had never really stopped to look at properly until today.  The Rockefeller Center itself was, of course, an enormous Depression Era initiative, and these mosaics were designed by Barry Faulkner - probably the best known American mosaicist in the first half of the C20th - made by the Ravenna Mosaic Works, and installed in 1933.  In the center is Thought, flanked by two figures representing Written Words (sending off messengers labelled News, Politics, and Poetry) and Spoken Words (the emissaries are Religion, Drama, and Music) - and you can see the Spoken Word brigade here, bearing down on a man in overalls.  The woman appears both to be blindfolded and to be shielding her eyes, which given that she's facing towards hell seems like a bad move on her part, and a disastrously misogynistic one on Faulkner's.   

But what I didn't know at all before today - and digging around trying to find out when the Rockefeller Center was built - is that in the early part of the C19th, this was the site of the Elgin Botanic Garden, the first public Botanical Garden in the US, founded by David Hosack (the physician who tended Hamilton's wounds after his 1804 duel, though obviously not successfully) in 1801, filling it with native and "exotic" plants - 

he especially was interested in those with medicinal value.  He had hothouses, and forested areas - but absolutely alas, he didn't have the money to keep it up; sold it to the city; they in turn sold it to Columbia, who thought they'd build the university there, but didn't; it fell into complete disrepair (Columbia couldn't be bothered to keep it up) by 1823; bits were leased out; a lot of the plants went off to furnish the grounds of the Bloomingdale Asylum, and Hosack's botanical library is now at NY Botanical Gardens.  And then the site was taken over by row houses - which became boarding houses, and speakeasies - and then the Rockefeller Center.  Maybe my book after next should be called something like Under 30 Rock?