High above Saks Fifth Avenue, an intimate service takes place in a very special garden every April. Designated as a place to remember the dead of two world wars, the Anzac Memorial Garden stemmed from the drive of New Zealand-born Hollywood movie star Nola Luxford and the generosity of Manhattan’s Rockefeller family.
Born in the small Rangitikei town of Hunterville in 1895, Luxford became an actress in silent movies and talkies after moving to Los Angeles in 1919. In the 1930s, she became a radio announcer in New York.
When World War II broke out, Luxford threw herself into war relief and fund-raising, hosting gatherings for many of the hundreds of young Australians and New Zealanders who flocked to New York on their final leave after pilot and navigator training in Canada.
Luxford initially used her apartment for the parties but as numbers grew she organised the free lease of a room and gathered a group of volunteer helpers. This was the start of the Anzac Club. By the end of the war, some 35,000 men had enjoyed its hospitality and Luxford had been dubbed the “Angel of the Anzacs” by New York’s media.
In 1940, she asked the public relations manager of the newly opened Rockefeller Centre if it would be possible to site an Anzac memorial garden on top of one of its buildings. Dominant on the midtown skyline, the original 14 art deco buildings were constructed by businessman and philanthropist John D Rockefeller and designed by leading architects including Raymond Hood, an early proponent of a “city of towers”.
Luxford’s preference for the garden was atop the British Empire Building, which overlooks Saks Fifth Avenue and St Patrick’s Cathedral on one side and the Rockefeller Centre’s ice-skating rink on the other. The Rockefeller family agreed.
The British Empire building and La Maison Française at 610 and 620 Fifth Avenue are art deco towers identical in design, each embellished to reflect the nation they represent. Completed in 1933, they are separated by the Channel Gardens, named after the English Channel.
Landscape architects Ralph Hancock and Aart van den Hoek were hired to design rooftop gardens with connecting bridges between them. But only four gardens went ahead, including those on the British Empire Building and La Maison Française.
Soil & steel
A seventh-floor penthouse opening onto a 1115 sq m garden is a feature of both buildings. Tonnes of soil were loaded into wheelbarrows and transported at night by lifts to build up plots laid over a layer of coarse gravel. Additional steel girders in the buildings supported the weight of the gardens.
The gardens were designed for viewing from surrounding buildings, not for public use. Each had a central rectangular lawn framed by privet hedges in a series of U shapes. Hancock painted the shallow 3.6m by 1.8m pools at the end of each lawn aquamarine to create the illusion of depth. Beside each pool were conical-shaped hedges, with dwarf firs in raised beds flanking the water.
The gardens had flagstone paths, low walls of honey-coloured Cotswold stone brought from England, and box hedging with flower beds. Heat generated from the buildings below ensured the lawns stayed green most of the year.
Luxford worked with van den Hoek to introduce an Antipodean aspect to the planting in the area designated as the Anzac garden. The pool there was said to represent the Pacific. The planting on one side represented Australia and New Zealand was on the other. Plantings at the top of the pool represented the US. Ahead of its opening in 1942, the garden was filled with red, white and blue blooms.
The plants have changed over time and in 1987, those in the remaining gardens, including the Anzac garden, were replaced. Although the newcomers were kept as close to the original as possible, the yew hedges in the Anzac garden were succeeded by boxwood. The lawns, which have always been real grass, are mowed twice a week by the team at the Rockefeller Centre.
Today, the garden has a simple planting of conical-shaped conifers punctuating the low hedging, with red begonias providing a vibrant contrast to the green.
On August 27, 1941, Prime Minister Peter Fraser dedicated the garden as a small but sacred space for New Zealanders and Australians in the heart of Manhattan. Laurance Rockefeller, son of John D Jr, attended the dedication. On display was the Dream of Youth, a statue by American sculptor Ethel Hood. The work shows two kneeling figures back to back with clasped hands, signifying the youth of New Zealand and Australia.
The consuls of the Allied nations were guests of honour at a ceremony on May 22, 1942, when a group of New Zealand and Australian airmen, soldiers and sailors were saluted by 50 men and women representing the United States, Great Britain, Russia, the Netherlands, China and the Australian and New Zealand Societies. A special detachment of Scouts carried the colours and a Scout bugler sounded Taps.
Luxford legacy
The garden was officially opened on June 2, 1943, by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, an event she recorded in her syndicated newspaper column, My Day.
Luxford kept in touch with the Rockefeller family, writing to them annually to describe each year’s ceremony and to thank them for their donation. In 1956, Luxford, by then 61 and living back in California, handed responsibility for conducting the Anzac Day commemoration to the Australian and New Zealand consulates, but she continued to attend the ceremony for years to come.
As well as dignitaries, many Australian and New Zealand personalities have visited the garden. In November 1947, 21-year-old Christchurch radio announcer Mary Wootton, who had won the “quest for New Zealand’s ideal girl”, planted a wattle to symbolise the friendship between the United States, Australia and New Zealand. She explained that it “was impossible to plant a kōwhai, New Zealand’s national flower, because it would not grow in New York’s climate”.
“Miss Teenager of Australia”, Diane Bell of Melbourne, visited the Anzac garden in October 1952 with the Australian consul-general, and in a gesture of transtasman goodwill, was photographed looking down on Saks Fifth Avenue while holding a stuffed toy kiwi. The garden has also taken a starring role in film: in the 2002 Spider-Man movie, the hero swung from building to building before reaching the safety of the Anzac garden.
Anzac Day services took place every year from its opening until the pandemic struck. A small service was held in 2022 and last year, things returned to normal.
Today, the garden is also used as a venue for weddings, product launches and other events – it can hold up to 220 people. But in the spirit in which the garden was created, American multinational corporation Tishman Speyer, which now owns Rockefeller Centre, has partnered with the New Zealand and Australian consulates in New York to allow them to use the garden once a year and keep alive the tradition begun by Nola Luxford in 1941. l
Clare Gleeson is a Wellington historian and writer. She visited the Anzac Memorial Garden for the first time in 2023 and has returned for the Anzac Day service this year.
