But perhaps best of all, what I got in Bonwit was a store the city very much wanted to keep in New York. I was able to make a very simple, very strong case to the people at the City Planning Commission. If you want Bonwit to return to Fifth Avenue, I told them, you’re going to have to give me my zoning.
Even with that, my approval was far from a sure thing. The local community board opposed such a tall building. As a ploy, they suggested a six-month moratorium on new buildings, to study whether the area was already overbuilt. A Committee to Ban the Building Boom sprang up. As soon as that happened, politicians had a knee-jerk reaction: they latched on to the cause.
Looking back, I don’t think politics or leverage made a critical difference one way or the other. I’m absolutely convinced that it was the architecture itself that won us our approval. And perhaps no one had a more powerful influence than Ada Louise Huxtable, then the chief architecture critic of the New York Times.
I took a calculated risk by inviting Huxtable to look at our model and renderings before the City Planning Commission voted on our zoning. The power of the New York Times is just awesome. It is certainly one of the most influential institutions in the world, and I recognized that anything Huxtable wrote would have enormous impact. Moreover, I knew that she was hostile to skyscrapers in general, and that she almost always preferred old and classical to new and glitzy. But by the middle of 1979, I was worried about whether I was going to get my zoning. I figured that Huxtable couldn’t make things worse, and that if I got lucky, she might write something that would help.
In early June, Huxtable came to see our plans. On Sunday, July 1, the Times Arts and Leisure section carried her “Architecture View” column about Trump Tower. It was titled “A New York Blockbuster of Superior Design.” That headline probably did more for my zoning than any single thing I ever said or did. The funny thing was that Huxtable spent the first half of her review complaining that our building was too big and suggesting that I had used “every trick in the book to maximize its size.” But, interestingly, she didn’t blame me so much as she did the city, for zoning laws that she said encouraged developers to do what I’d done. And then, at the end, she gave us several terrific lines. “A great deal of care has been lavished on its design,” she wrote, adding, “It is undeniably a dramatically handsome structure.”
In October, the planning commission unanimously approved our zoning. The commission said it would have preferred a masonry façade for Trump Tower, as more compatible with neighboring buildings, but added that they didn’t insist, in light of the fact that I would be providing “extraordinary public amenities.” In the end, we negotiated an FAR of 21, barely less than the 21.6 maximum. I settled for just two fewer floors than I’d originally sought. That gave me the equivalent of a sixty-eight-story building, including the huge double-ceilinged six-level atrium, which made Trump Tower the tallest residential building in the city. At the same time, the city took Huxtable’s comments about the zoning laws to heart. Responding to the way I’d used bonuses and air rights to create a much bigger building, the city amended its zoning laws to prevent others from doing the same thing in the future.
Once I had my zoning, the next challenge was getting the tower built. It wasn’t going to be cheap. When you build above a certain height, construction costs rise almost geometrically, simply because it becomes so much more costly to do everything, from reinforcing the infrastructure to bringing up piping. On the other hand, because I had such a prime location, I felt I could afford it. If I did the job right, I’d be able to charge such a premium that the extra cost would be irrelevant.
In October 1980, Chase Manhattan agreed to provide financing for the construction of Trump Tower. I made a deal with HRH Construction to be my general contractor. The budget for the whole job—acquisition of the land, construction, carrying charges, advertising, and promotion—was slightly more than $200 million. The person I hired to be my personal representative overseeing the construction, Barbara Res, was the first woman ever put in charge of a skyscraper in New York. She was thirty-three at the time, she’d worked for HRH, and I’d met her on the Commodore job, where she’d worked as a mechanical superintendent. I’d watched her in construction meetings, and what I liked was that she took no guff from anyone. She was half the size of most of these bruising guys, but she wasn’t afraid to tell them off when she had to, and she knew how to get things done.
It’s funny. My own mother was a housewife all her life. And yet it’s turned out that I’ve hired a lot of women for top jobs, and they’ve been among my best people. Often, in fact, they are far more effective than the men around them. Louise Sunshine, who was an executive vice president in my company for ten years, was as relentless a fighter as you’ll ever meet. Blanche Sprague, the executive vice president who handles all sales and oversees the interior design of my buildings, is one of the best salespeople and managers I’ve ever met. Norma Foerderer, my executive assistant, is sweet and charming and very classy, but she’s steel underneath, and people who think she can be pushed around find out very quickly that they’re mistaken. Ivana, my wife, is a great manager who treats her employees very well, but she’s also very demanding and very competitive. Her employees respect her because they know she’s pushing herself as hard as she’s pushing them.
We began demolition of the Bonwit building on March 15, 1980, and almost immediately I found myself in the middle of a major controversy over the two bas-relief Art Deco sculptures that were a decorative feature of the exterior of the building. All during 1979, long after I’d announced my plans and begun negotiating for zoning, no one expressed any interest in those friezes. No representative from zoning, from landmarks preservation, or from any community arts group ever suggested saving them. Finally, in mid-December of 1979, shortly before I was to begin construction, I got a call from someone at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, asking if I’d consider donating the friezes, and certain iron grillwork. I said that if the friezes could be saved, I’d be happy to donate them to the museum.
What happened was that we began the demolition, and when it came time to take down the friezes, my guys came to me, and they said, “Mr. Trump, these are a lot heavier than we thought, and if you want to try to save them, we’re going to have to add special scaffolding for safety’s sake, and it’s going to take at least several weeks.” My carrying charges on the construction loan for this project were enormous—not to mention the extra construction costs of delaying the job. I just wasn’t prepared to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars to save a few Art Deco sculptures that I believed were worth considerably less, and perhaps not very much at all. So I ordered my guys to rip them down.
What I didn’t count on was the outrage this would create. The following day, the New York Times ran a front-page picture of the workmen demolishing the sculptures, and the next thing I knew I’d become a symbol of everything evil about modern developers. A Times editorial described the demolition as “a memorable version of cash flow calculations outweighing public sensibilities” and went on to say that “obviously big buildings do not make big human beings, nor do big deals make art experts.”
It was not the sort of publicity you like to get. Looking back, I regret that I had the sculptures destroyed. I’m not convinced they were truly valuable, and I still think that a lot of my critics were phonies and hypocrites, but I understand now that certain events can take on a symbolic importance. Frankly, I was too young, and perhaps in too much of a hurry, to take that into account. The point is that despite what some people may think, I’m not looking to be a bad guy when it isn’t absolutely necessary.
Ironically, the whole controversy may have ended up being a plus for me in terms of selling Trump Tower. The stories that appeared about it invariably started with sentences like: “In order to make way for one of the world’s most luxurious buildings …” Even though the publicity was almost entirely negative, there was a great deal of it, and that drew a tremendous amount of attention to Trump
Tower. Almost immediately we saw an upsurge in the sales of apartments. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, and in truth it probably says something perverse about the culture we live in. But I’m a businessman, and I learned a lesson from that experience: good publicity is preferable to bad, but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all. Controversy, in short, sells.
So, it turned out, does glamour. Even before we started construction, I’d begun to realize that the atrium could prove to be one of the most dazzling parts of Trump Tower. At first we just set out to make it an attractive setting for retailers, but when I saw the final drawings and the model, I realized it could be truly spectacular. I also decided I would spend whatever it took to assure that it lived up to its potential.
Perhaps the best example is the marble. Originally I thought of using the brown paradisio that had been so successful for the lobby of the Grand Hyatt. But in the end, I became convinced that what was great for a hotel lobby wasn’t necessarily right for a retail-shopping atrium. Der, Ivana, and I looked at hundreds of marble samples. Finally, we came upon something called Breccia Perniche, a rare marble in a color none of us had ever seen before—an exquisite blend of rose, peach, and pink that literally took our breath away. Of course it was incredibly expensive—in part because it was a very irregular marble. When we went to the quarry, we discovered that much of the marble contained large white spots and white veins. That was jarring to me and took away from the beauty of the stone. So we ended up going to the quarry with black tape and marking off the slabs that were the best. The rest we just scrapped—maybe 60 percent of the total. By the time we were finished, we’d taken the whole top of the mountain and used up much of the quarry. Next, I made sure to get the finest craftsmen to cut and lay the marble, because unless your workmen are the best, you get jagged edges, poor matching, and asymmetry, and then you’ve lost the whole effect.
That effect was heightened by the fact that we used so much marble—on the floors and for the walls six full floors up. It created a very luxurious and a very exciting feeling. Invariably, people comment that the atrium—and the color of the marble particularly—is friendly and flattering, but also vibrant and energizing—all things you want people to feel when they shop: comfortable, but also pumped up to spend money.
Of course, the marble was only part of it. The whole atrium space was very dramatic and different. Rather than making the railings out of aluminum, which is cheap and practical, we used polished brass, which was much more expensive but also more elegant, and which blended wonderfully with the color of the marble. Then we used a lot of reflective glass, particularly on the sides of the escalators. That was critical, because it made a fairly small core space look far larger and more dramatic. The sense of spaciousness was further enhanced by the fact that we used only two structural columns in the entire atrium. The result is that no matter where you stand, you get an unimpeded view and a sense of great openness.
The third element that adds to the drama of the atrium is one I actually fought against at first: making the entrance from Fifth Avenue unusually large. Zoning regulations required only a fifteen-foot width, and I didn’t want to lose any more retail space that fronted on Fifth Avenue than I had to. However, the city pushed very hard for a thirty-foot width, and finally, reluctantly, I went along. It cost me some very valuable retail square footage, but now I think that what I got instead—a spectacular entrance—was more than worth it. I give the City Planning Commission full credit for that.
The last key element in the atrium was the waterfall that runs along the eastern wall. It’s nearly eighty feet high, and it cost almost $2 million to build. Most of my people at first favored putting paintings on the walls. To me that was old-fashioned, unoriginal, and just not very exciting. As it turned out, the waterfall proved to be an art form in itself, almost a sculptured wall. Also, it attracts far more attention than we’d have gotten if we’d put up even some very wonderful art. If most malls succeed in part because they’re so safe and homogeneous, I’m convinced that the Trump Tower atrium succeeds for just the opposite reasons. It’s larger than life, and walking through it is a transporting experience, almost as if you’re in a wonderland.
We tried to create a version of that feeling in the apartments themselves. The most dramatic element we had to offer, of course, was the views. Since the residential units didn’t start until the thirtieth level, most were higher than the surrounding buildings, which meant they had views to the north of Central Park, to the south of the Statue of Liberty, to the east of the East River, and to the west of the Hudson. In addition, the sawtooth design of the building gave all the major rooms in the apartments views in at least two directions. And then, to make sure we took the best advantage of those views, we built huge windows, virtually from floor to ceiling. I would have made the windows all the way from floor to ceiling, but I was told that unless there is at least some base below a window, some people get vertigo.
The funny thing is that the inside of the apartments was less important than a lot of the other elements. We quickly discovered that the sort of buyer who spends $1 million for a two-bedroom pied-à-terre, or $5 million for a four-bedroom duplex, is going to hire his own designer, gut the apartment, and rebuild it to fit his own tastes.
In the end, the reason that we were able to charge unprecedented prices for the apartments was something beyond any specific luxuries we provided. It was the fact that—through some blend of design, materials, location, promotion, luck, and timing—Trump Tower took on a mystical aura. A lot of buildings can be successful, but I’m convinced that only one, at any given time, can achieve the blend of qualities necessary to attract the best buyers and command the top prices.
Before Trump Tower, the last building to achieve that mystique had been Olympic Tower, on 51st Street off Fifth Avenue, built in the 1970s. The key ingredient was the fact that Aristotle Onassis owned it. At the time, Onassis was living an amazing life. He was married to Jackie Kennedy and was the ultimate jet-setter with mansions around the world, a huge yacht, and even his own island, Skorpios. He was very rich and very hot, and while Olympic Tower wasn’t a particularly exciting or attractive building, it was the right product done by the right guy at the right time. It absolutely stole the top of the market from another luxury building that went up around the same time, the Galleria on East 57th Street.
As it turned out, Trump Tower also stole the market from one potentially major competitor. Long before I made my deal for the Bonwit site, another developer announced plans to build a huge condominium tower above the Museum of Modern Art, just off Fifth Avenue at 53rd Street. By all rights it should have been a fantastic success. The connection with the museum was very prestigious, the location was good, the architect, Cesar Pelli, was a big name, and the developer made it clear that he would spare no expense to build the best.
However, Trump Tower far outsold Museum Tower. first of all, although we got started later on construction, we began selling apartments in Trump Tower around the same time that Museum Tower did. From the start, I could see we had some advantages. Obviously, we had a better location on Fifth Avenue. But in addition, the shape of Museum Tower wasn’t inspiring. The facade, with its multicolored glass, wasn’t unusually striking, and the lobby was just another lobby. Finally, Museum Tower was marketed poorly. Their ads were dull, there was no attempt to create excitement, and it came off as just an average building.
By contrast, we took our strengths and promoted them to the skies. From day one, we set out to sell Trump Tower not just as a beautiful building in a great location but as an event. We positioned ourselves as the only place for a certain kind of very wealthy person to live—the hottest ticket in town. We were selling fantasy.
The one market we didn’t go after was old-money New Yorkers, who generally want to live in older buildings anyway. On the other hand, we could appeal to several other categories of wealthy people.
Obviously, we we
re a natural choice for people connected with show business, in the sense that we’d created something very glamorous. Foreigners were another big market—Europeans, South Americans, Arabs, and Asians. Practically speaking, we offered them an immediate advantage. At the time we began selling Trump Tower, it was virtually the only condominium in New York. To buy an apartment in a condominium, all you need is the purchase price. To buy a cooperative—which is what most buildings in New York were at the time—you need approval from its board of directors, who have ridiculous, arbitrary powers, including the right to demand all kinds of financial data, social references, and personal interviews. Then they can reject you for any reason they choose, without explanation. It’s a license to discriminate. The worst part is that many people on these co-op boards get their kicks from showing off their power. It’s absurd and probably illegal, but it happened to be great for Trump Tower. Many wealthy foreigners didn’t have the proper social references for these cooperatives, or didn’t want to put themselves through the scrutiny of a bunch of prying strangers. Instead, they came to us.
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