Leading his first project, Trump was “very brash and extremely self-confident,” Res said, even as many of his decisions struck experienced construction workers as amateurish. Architects and contractors were afraid to challenge him, creating what Res called a “deadly combination: . . . an aggressive and powerful person in charge who is also inexperienced.” With his lenders watching, Trump scoured the work for savings. He believed he could recoup some dollars by salvaging the old Commodore’s pipes and steel. The impulse was copied directly from his father, a legendary penny-pincher who once boasted that he had saved $13,000 in one day by convincing a contractor to shave the price of painting thirteen thousand apartments by a dollar each. Donald’s attempt at thrift backfired. Union workers spent many hours spray-painting color codes on every metal object—red for trash, green for keep—slowing construction to a crawl.
For his architect, Trump had recruited Der Scutt, a pipe-smoking rising star of New York modernist design. After their first meeting, on a Friday night at Maxwell’s Plum, Trump invited Scutt back to his apartment. Like Trump, Scutt had his own blend of ego-driven eccentricities—he had changed his first name from Donald to the German word for “the.” He was ruffled by Trump’s “extremely aggressive” sales technique and tendency toward exaggeration. Still, he was energized by Trump’s unceasing demands. “He thinks nothing of calling me at seven a.m. on a Sunday and saying, ‘I’ve got an idea. See you in the office in forty minutes,’ ” Scutt said. “And I always go.”
The modernized Grand Hyatt opened on September 25, 1980, six years after Trump had first targeted the Commodore. Designed initially to serve middle-class travelers, the fourteen-hundred-room hotel had taken on considerable luxury, with brass fixtures and room rates that started at $115 a night (about $330 in 2016 dollars). To toast its opening, the Grand Hyatt hosted a star-studded party in the ballroom, attended by the governor, mayor, former mayor, Cohn, and others from New York’s real estate elite. The Grand Hyatt would prove the exemplar of Trump’s development style: generous tax breaks, leveraging rival interests against each other, and a hefty dose of financial chutzpah and sleight of hand. Trump claimed that the hotel helped jump-start the Grand Central neighborhood and usher in a new age of glamour for Manhattan. Trump said the project changed his life: “If I hadn’t finally convinced the city to choose my West Thirty-Fourth Street site for its convention center and then gone on to develop the Grand Hyatt, I’d probably be back in Brooklyn today, collecting rents.”
The doom Trump had predicted for the neighborhood never came to pass. By the time crews first started working on the Commodore, a dozen other office, apartment, and hotel projects were already rising in surrounding blocks—without the government assistance Trump said was essential to get anything going in the dreary area. Now, as hotel visitors rolled in, he tightened his grip on one of the few concessions he’d made to land his tax break. In 1987, Trump told his accountants to change their reporting methods, limiting the amount that the Grand Hyatt’s profit-sharing deal would deliver to the city government. When the city’s auditor general, Karen Burstein, reviewed hotel records, she found that “aberrant” accounting practices had shortchanged the city by millions of dollars in taxes. Asked years later about the changes, Trump said he did not remember the investigation.
In the years that followed, Trump would spar often with Hyatt’s ruling family, including a messy lawsuit-countersuit that ended with the Pritzkers agreeing in 1995 to pay $25 million for renovations. Battling against heavy debts as his empire expanded, Trump ended up selling his half of the Hyatt to the family in 1996, ending his involvement in the project that launched his career. Trump kept about $25 million of the $142 million sale price, but most of the money would go toward paying off part of the billions his businesses then owed, including hundreds of millions that Trump had personally guaranteed.
• • •
IN THOSE DAYS, TRUMP and Sunshine would tool around Manhattan in the back of Trump’s limousine, looking for potential projects. One day, they passed the Fifth Avenue flagship of Bonwit Teller, an upscale women’s department store that had fallen on hard times. “Oh, I love that site, let’s find out who owns it, let’s tear the building down,” Trump said. This, Trump decided, would be the spot for his signature project, Trump Tower, a glittering statement on New York’s most majestic boulevard. Sunshine led Donald to a major stockholder of Genesco, the conglomerate that owned Bonwit Teller’s lease. In November 1978, when Trump learned the company was open to selling, he secured, for no money, an option allowing him to buy out the lease for $25 million—a free shot at one of the most pivotal blocks in midtown Manhattan. When rival developers learned of the deal and offered better prices, Trump fought back, threatening a trip to court if the trustee didn’t honor his word.
Trump now controlled the lease to the building at what he called “the best location anywhere in the world”—but he needed two other pieces: the land below, owned by insurance giant Equitable, and the air rights above, which were controlled by Tiffany & Co., the iconic jeweler, whose landmark building was next door, where Audrey Hepburn window-shopped in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and where Trump had bought Ivana her diamond engagement ring. With the Grand Hyatt built and open, Trump didn’t have to fight for loans anymore. Chase Manhattan fronted him funds covering the rights above and below Bonwit Teller, plus more than $100 million for construction. Trump persuaded Equitable, one of his lenders for the Grand Hyatt, to sell him the land in exchange for a 50 percent stake in the project.
Der Scutt again signed on as architect and sketched a striking sawtooth-edged building, resembling a staircase on its side. Trump Tower’s upper condos would have two city views, a rationale for Trump to charge higher prices. Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable praised the black-glass tower as a “dramatically handsome structure” with “28 shimmering sides.” City zoning laws would have blocked a tower of such height on such a small site, but Trump cleverly used Tiffany’s air rights and more lenient rules for mixed-use office-retail-residential projects to expand skyward. The tower also took advantage of a zoning provision that allowed greater height if the builder provided public spaces such as atriums. City planners had grown leery of new skyscrapers, especially in a time of growing public backlash against more shadowy canyons in Manhattan. But Scutt’s plan and Trump’s dealmaking won out. City officials did trim his design from sixty-three to fifty-eight stories, but Trump got the last word, simply renumbering the fifty-eight-story tower’s floors so they extended up to sixty-eight.
• • •
FIRST, BONWIT TELLER’S ELEGANT storefront had to go. But some New Yorkers loved the art deco building, especially a soaring bronze grillwork above the entrance and a pair of fifteen-foot-tall bas-relief sculptures, or friezes, of nearly naked goddesses dancing over Fifth Avenue. (“A poor advertisement, one might think, for a shop devoted to women’s apparel,” a New Yorker architecture columnist wrote in 1930.)
Robert Miller, owner of an art gallery across the street, and Penelope Hunter-Stiebel, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, believed they could persuade Trump to preserve the pieces by donating them to the museum in exchange for a generous appraisal—estimated at more than $200,000—that he could use as a tax write-off. Hunter-Stiebel had experience appealing to landowners’ sense of history: the Met had acquired from Rockefeller Center a 1930s-era elevator cab that represented the art moderne style. Perhaps Trump would cooperate, too. He seemed enthusiastic. “This is going to be a great deal!” Trump said when they met at his office.
But on June 5, 1980, Miller called Hunter-Stiebel from his gallery and told her he could see construction workers on scaffolding outside Bonwit Teller. They were blasting the sculptures to smithereens. Hunter-Stiebel, nine months pregnant, raced out of the Met, jumped into a taxi, and, when her driver got stuck in traffic, ran the last ten blocks to Bonwit Teller. Meanwhile, at the site, Miller offered the construction foreman cash to spare the sculptures. The foreman r
efused, telling him, “Young Donald said there’s a stupid woman uptown at a museum who wants them and we have to destroy them.” Hunter-Stiebel arrived and gasped “in incredulous horror,” she recalled. “They were jackhammering through the neck of one of the figures. It was unbelievable.”
“Developer Scraps Bonwit Sculptures,” read the front-page headline on the next morning’s Times. The article quoted “John Baron,” a “vice-president of the Trump organization,” explaining that the company had decided on demolition after three independent appraisers concluded that the sculptures were “without artistic merit,” were worth less than $9,000, and would have cost $32,000 to move. John Barron—usually spelled with two r’s—was a pseudonym that Trump often used when he did not want to identify himself to a reporter. Two days later, Trump, using his real name, addressed the incident, saying that removing the sculptures could have cost more than $500,000. “My biggest concern was the safety of people on the street below,” he insisted. “If one of those stones had slipped, people could have been killed.”
The incident became Trump’s first public-relations fiasco. “Mr. Trump may assume that esthetic vandalism soon vanishes from civic memory,” the Times wrote in an editorial. “But what he has destroyed with the sculptures is the public image he was building with his new Fifth Avenue skyscraper.” Kent Barwick, chairman of New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, said the demolition established Trump “as a bad guy. Afterwards, rightly or wrongly, there was a question of trust.” Trump later expressed “regret” for the demolition and argued that he had to move quickly on the demolition to avoid long delays caused by historic preservationists. In Trump: The Art of the Deal, though, he said he was delighted by the negative coverage because it generated free publicity and helped him sell apartments. In the eighties, Trump said that the sculptures “were nothing” and “junk.” A decade later, visitors to Trump’s fifty-three-room penthouse would remark on a particularly notable piece of relief artwork in his two-story dining room: a carved ivory frieze.
• • •
BONWIT TELLER WAS SO tightly wedged into Fifth Avenue’s streetscape that crews could not use traditional demolition tools such as wrecking balls or dynamite. Instead, the historic building had to be dismantled piece by piece. To handle the grueling job, Trump turned to Kaszycki & Sons Contractors, which had submitted a rock-bottom bid.
The work was done by hundreds of undocumented Polish immigrants known as the “Polish brigade.” The men toiled through spring and summer of 1980 with sledgehammers and blowtorches, but without hard hats, working twelve- to eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, often sleeping on Bonwit Teller’s floors. They were paid less than $5 an hour, sometimes in vodka. Many went unpaid and were threatened with deportation if they complained. In 1983, the year Trump Tower opened, members of the Housewreckers Local 95 union filed suit claiming that Trump had illegally permitted undocumented immigrants to work on the tower. John Szabo, an immigration lawyer representing the workers, said a Mr. Barron—that name again—had called him from the Trump organization and threatened a lawsuit if the workers didn’t drop their demand for back payments. In 1990, after years of delays, Trump testified that he did not know the workers were undocumented. He blamed Kaszycki & Sons.
The judge ruled against Trump and the contractor, saying that one of Trump’s top aides at the site, Thomas Macari, “was involved in every aspect of the demolition job.” Trump appealed and won a partial reversal, but the court ruled that Trump “should have known” about the Polish workers. The case was settled and sealed in 1999. Years later, Trump would call illegal immigration “a wrecking ball aimed at U.S. taxpayers.”
• • •
WITH BONWIT TELLER DEMOLISHED, the complicated construction of Trump Tower began in earnest. A few days after the Grand Hyatt’s opening party, Donald and Ivana had invited Res up to their gleaming Fifth Avenue apartment. The living room offered breathtaking vistas of Central Park, and the furniture, curtains, and carpets were harmonized in the same stylish white. When Ivana offered Res an orange juice, she declined, worried she’d leave a stain. At the Grand Hyatt, Res—five feet four with shoulder-length brown hair, often seen in a hard hat, flannel shirt, corduroy pants, and work boots—had held her own as one of the few women at the construction site, where workers openly urinated on columns and covered walls in crude nude sketches of her and Ivana. But although Res knew she’d won the Trumps’ respect, she didn’t expect Donald’s next request.
“I want you to build Trump Tower for me,” he said. The high-rise would feature the glitziest shops, top-of-the-line offices, and the most luxurious condos. Trump didn’t have the time to be as involved as he had been at the Grand Hyatt. He needed someone to be his eyes and ears, a “Donna Trump,” as he called her, in charge of construction for “the most important project in the world.” Res would become the tower’s chief engineer, in charge of all construction, when she was only thirty-one. She was one of a very few women in an executive role in real estate development at the time, and Donald appointed her over the objection of his father, who told his son that that kind of work wasn’t for women.
The tower’s first five floors were to be filled with a high-end shopping arcade. Stacked on top would be eleven floors of offices, thirty-eight floors of luxury condos, and several mechanical floors to keep the whole thing running. Trump wanted his tower, unlike most steel-boned skyscrapers, to be built largely with reinforced concrete, allowing for more flexible floor plans. Construction, Res said, was designed as a “fast-track” job, with crews starting work before the full drawings were complete. Crews worked six days a week, pouring a new concrete floor every two days. One concrete foreman, Eddie Bispo, said the construction schedule was so demanding that he would get to work at 6:00 a.m. and sometimes not leave until 11:30 p.m.
The decision to hurry the job forced Trump to intersect with New York’s powerful “concrete club,” a cartel of Mafia-controlled unions and contractors who colluded to drive up prices, block out rivals, and punish resistant developers with costly strikes. Many other New York developers at the time felt compelled to enter the same thorny arrangement. The concrete for Trump Tower came from S&A Concrete, then owned by the heads of two New York crime families: “Fat” Tony Salerno, of the Genovese family, and Paul “Big Paul” Castellano, of the Gambinos (Castellano was assassinated in 1985 outside Sparks Steak House on Manhattan’s East Side in a Mafia hit organized by the mobster John Gotti). Roy Cohn had represented Salerno and other mob figures and been friendly with another boss, John Cody, who ran the Teamsters union that controlled cement truckers. Documents cited by the House Subcommittee on Criminal Justice in 1989 called Cody “the most significant labor racketeer preying on the construction industry in New York.”
In 1982, when union strikes froze developments across the city, construction at Trump Tower didn’t miss a beat. When the tower opened the next year, three large duplexes on the sixty-fourth and sixty-fifth floors, just below Trump’s penthouse, were sold to Cody’s girlfriend, Verina Hixon, whose apartments benefited from costly upgrades, including the tower’s only indoor swimming pool. Trump Tower’s structural engineers did the work, including designing a special frame to accommodate the pool. For six months after she moved in, Hixon had thirty to fifty workmen in her units every day, installing cedar and lacquer closets, large mirrors, and a sauna at a total cost of $150,000. When Trump resisted one of Hixon’s requests, she called Cody, and construction deliveries to the building stopped until work at her apartment resumed.
Hixon stood out among Trump Tower’s ultrawealthy condo clientele. In a 1986 deposition, conducted after she failed to make payments on a $3 million loan, Hixon said she had never been employed, owned one checking account with $2 in it, and had no savings accounts, stocks, or property besides her lushly appointed Trump Tower condo. She said her ex-husband, a wealthy Texas businessman, sent her $2,000 a month in child support, covered her $7,800 monthly condo maintenance fees, and paid for the prep
-school tuition of their sixteen-year-old son. Hixon said her apartment was mostly unfurnished, with only a couple of chairs and “beat-up tables” to go along with the indoor pool. She had other furniture in storage, but could not remember where it was: “In America somewhere, Brooklyn, who knows where these things go?” She said she never ate at home, but rather at fine restaurants, including La Côte Basque, La Grenouille, and 21. How did she pay for it all? “I have rich friends,” she said. “They love to invite me.” After Cody was convicted on racketeering charges in 1982 and sent to prison, Trump took Hixon to court. After she missed $300,000 in condo maintenance payments, Hixon went bankrupt and lenders seized her Trump Tower apartments.
Subpoenaed by federal investigators in 1980, Trump denied giving away apartments to keep his project on track. Cody, meanwhile, said he “knew Trump quite well,” adding that “Donald liked to deal with me through Roy Cohn.” After Cody died in 2001, Trump called him “one psychopathic crazy bastard” and “real scum.”
• • •
EVEN AS THE TOWER was going up, Trump pushed ahead with plans for a massive condo complex on the southern edge of Central Park. In 1981, he bought two grand old buildings—the Barbizon Plaza Hotel, and a fifteen-story apartment building next door at 100 Central Park South—for $13 million. Trump bought them to demolish them, but he ran into hard resistance from tenants eager to keep their rent-controlled units. Trump decried his opponents as “millionaires in mink coats, driving Rolls-Royces.” Some of the residents were seniors on fixed incomes; others were indeed well-to-do stars.
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