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Salesman & City Saver. The new Chase headquarters building combines the familiar Rockefeller urge to improve New York City with the more practical aim of selling Chase spectacularly. While other banks were deserting the crowded downtown financial district for roomy midtown offices, David defiantly bought a chunk of downtown land that Morgan Guaranty Trust had decided was too waterlogged to build on. The result: the Chase Manhattan Plaza, where lower Manhattan's first good-looking new building in half a century sits in the midst of a spacious, tree-studded terrazzo terrace. The new Chase headquarters has the nation's biggest bank vault in the biggest underground banking area, the biggest automatic check-sorting center, the biggest air-conditioning unit. As a visible gesture in public relations, the building has done more than anything else to proclaim that Chase Manhattan is big, bold and forward-looking. And, says Chemical Bank's Chairman Helm, "Rockefeller has added strength to the financial community by locating it downtown." David Rockefeller has also enhanced the financial strength of the art community by pouring $500.000 of Chase Manhattan's money into paintings, sculptures and many other knickknacks to decorate the new building. Most of the art is the contemporary abstract kind considered proper by that other Rockefeller institution, the Museum of Modern Art, and runs heavily to framed smudges of color (in David's private washroom, there is a Cézanne lithograph). Few Chase executives try to understand their boss's artistic acquisitions, and his family does not share his tastes. Peggy and the children recently assembled a Rube Goldberg statue from pipes, wrenches, tubes and scrap metal and presented it to David in all solemnity as their own latest artistic find. Tolerant of the teasing, David defends his selections: "They might not mean anything to you now, but if you look at them for three or four days, you will find them very soothing.'1 No Nostalgia. All the time, talent and dedication that David Rockefeller devotes to the Chase earns him nothing financially, because his $175,000-3-year salary merely adds to his mammoth tax burden. However, he says cheerfully, "it allows me to give more to charity." More important, the Chase is a potent showcase for his conviction that private enterprise has a major contribution to make in solving the world's economic and social problems. "The profit motive has been the prime generating force producing economic growth since the Industrial Revolution," he says. "Business leaders must point out forcefully and persuasively those government policies or actions that prevent the private economy from achieving its full potential and making its maximum contribution to the common good. But to be effective, the approach must be forward-looking and realistic—not mere nostalgia for the past or a rearguard action to preserve positions of narrow self-interest." If businessmen do not develop such an approach, warns David Rockefeller in his earnest and low-voiced way. or "if they do not concern themselves with the full spectrum of problems civilization faces, they will find themselves, a few years hence, living in a very different and less congenial world."