You know what? Even I’m not depraved enough to write a bio of Donald Trump, whose birthday is June 14th. FLAG DAY. He will be 77. Lawsuits and indictments are springing up like STD sores. I assume. I, thankfully, have no personal knowledge.
Anyone interested could spend several lifetimes reading news/“news” accounts, court transcripts, current and not-so-current events, recaps of Trump-related clutter, his own ghost-written books, the casual dismissal of his father’s Nazi ties by the MSM, it’s a tsunami. But because I am a very strange character myself, really one of the things I remember most is Trump Tower, which, we all forget, was supposedly a harbinger of the rebirth of New York when it opened in stages in 1983.
It is completely fabulous and I hope it becomes a New York landmark that survives the takeover of the apes so that when I, the astronaut, in my loin-cloth, will land and look at it and say, “You damned dirty apes, although actually…”
I think it’s worthy of landmark status. No one in New York would be willing to grant it that publicly; any Landmarks Preservation Committee member who voted for it would be kicked off and return to the status of Assistant Deputy Secretary of Manhattan Community Board 12, whose husband happens to be… But I would. There is such a thing as the “Eighties High Baroque,” and Spy Magazine covered this relentlessly, but they didn’t call it this.
Post-Modernism, at least in New York, is another example of the vulgarity and the exuberance of the very newly rich. Wiki classifies Trump Tower as “Modernism.” Oh no it’s not. I worked in a building not too far from Trump Tower that was thrown up by Kohn Pedersen Fox, in 1970, and it is one of those cheap Modernist knock-offs. Like a lot of these eyesores, their greatest asset is the view, because you don’t actually have to look at them, you look out from them. Believe me. Trump Tower it was not.
Manhattan is littered with these knock-offs. However, they’re all intermingled. I just saw a photo of a “skyline” of a small American city (but not that small, I was shocked to learn) and I thought, “Did all the people who live there only realize you could build above 4 stories in 1965, but then stopped doing it in 1975?” I also once visited a city, which shall go unnamed, and observed, “This is the worst urban renewal failure I’ve ever seen.” It was a road trip, and my co-driver said, “I travel for a living. I can name ten off the top of my head that are worse.”
So anyway, there the almost Counter-Reformation-like Trump Tower is (the Fifth Avenue one, not the various other once-co-branded residential developments where his name has been stripped from the buildings, and the somewhat bankrupt hotel/residential projects) and I used to hang out at Trump Tower!
Yes. In the very early 90s a couple of friends and I were obsessed with the over-the-top vulgarity of the public spaces (which is why it must be landmarked) and the absolute lack of any kind of real retail or culinary draw. They did have public bathrooms, if you knew about them, so you’d descend to this sub-level via a staircase whose faux-brass handrail always felt greasy, and this was years before he asked people to vote for him. Down there, if I’m remembering this correctly, there was an outlet of a sad croissant chain that I can picture in my mind but can’t be arsed to research further, and a blind shoeshine guy. This, actually, is not as counterintuitive as you would think, because I once took advantage of his services. The shoeshine guys are chatty, like barbers, and I asked him how he got into it. He said something like, “It’s a very tactile occupation, so I can feel a shoe, I can feel a foot, I can feel my [gloss/ I forget what he called it] and my cloths. And when it comes time to pay my friends [at the failing croissant chain] have my back. So don’t try to give me a dollar bill and pass it off as a 20.”
I’m really wandering off the path here. I meant to provide a recipe for a Mexican Taco Bowl, maybe one served at The Trump Grill(e), which I’ve never made, or been served, but I’m exhausted. Please let these links suffice.
https://www.eater.com/2016/5/5/11602942/donald-trump-taco-bowl-cinco-de-mayo
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/12/trump-grill-review
I seem to recall lots of stories of how shoddy it was. Things like veneer peeling off, joints which didn’t meet, lots of wobbling and sagging walls and floors.
I know NYC has lots of genuinely well built and beautifully decorated places, including rival apartment buildings and hotels, and it’s not like people could have missed the difference.
So it’s weird to me how much criticism leaned into descriptions like ostentatious or over the top, which still suggested that Trump had put a lot of thought and money into it, and the only debate was just a matter of taste. It’s obviously like this old Lincoln Continental, just a badly designed, rotting hulk, executed with shoddy workmanship overseen by dysfunctional management.
https://jackbaruth.com/?p=24061
On one side of Trump Tower is Tiffany’s, which allegedly is why he called his fourth, forgotten child “Tiffany,” instead of “the bitch told me she was on birth control”. Tiffany’s almost had to abandon their lease, because the Trump name became so toxic and the security was so intense, and various public officials decided during the pandemic that shopping for a man’s bracelet (as I did, pre-pandemic, of course) was much more lethal than joining a thousand screaming, unmasked, presumably unemployed and unemployable people near the Barclay Center in Brooklyn for a little looting and rioting.
But back to your point. I think, to this day, 40 years later, that contractors are still in dispute with the Trump Organization over unpaid bills concerning Trump Tower. And then his (or his organization’s) lawyers sue for their unpaid fees. A very strange way to do business. But he’s been doing this since the early 1970s, at least, and no one in New York called him on it, so our bad, I guess.
I can even believe that there are worse developers than him, but that’s sort of like saying the Unibomber wasn’t the worst mailbomber ever.
Thank you for today’s story!
I’m channeling the ghost of Jeff Zucker from when he ran CNN: Just throw Donald Trump in there to attract clicks and views.
Replace Salsa with Ketchup
I don’t actually know what a Mexican Taco Bowl is. When we first moved to this neighborhood it was a culinary wasteland. It still is, in a lot of ways, full of fast-food ripoff outposts and disgusting mom-and-pops that might as well have signs saying “Lunch special! + 1 Can Soda Your Choice +1 Dose Salmonella Trichinosis Your Choice!” It sure prompts healthy eating and cuts down on the restaurant bills when Cousin Mattie is at the Viking MORNING NOON AND NIGHT.
I’ll wait for taco indictment Tuesday to make this.
Excellent! Sunday is often Chef Mattie’s night off and when it is, we normally order from the one decent Mexican restaurant for miles around. They don’t offer a taco bowl, sadly, and I bet they don’t know what one is. They do have incredibly delicious soft tacos, though, and if I call them and talk to them in (bad and rusty, at this point) Spanish, they’ll make things spicier and more authentic for me than they normally would for their gringo clientele.