The bizarre history of Trump Tower

[cronus]

http://nypost.com/2017/01/20/the-bizarr ... -leave-it/

The bizarre history of Trump Tower — and why Donald loathes to leave it

It arrived under a cascade of 10,000 balloons in a delirious blaze of 1980s optimism. Donald Trump’s pink-marble fantasy, home to the world’s most glamorous boutiques, wrapped in gleaming, dark-bronze glass, opened on Fifth Avenue when empty store windows and “Going Out of Business” signs abounded.

For a few golden years after its opening on Feb. 14, 1983, Trump Tower audaciously screamed that New York, beset by soaring crime and crumbling streets, might once again live up to its self-proclaimed “world’s greatest city” image.

Sightseers oohed over the seven-story-high lobby waterfall. Wide-eyed fashionistas flocked to stores like Cartier and Buccellati, which ringed five atrium levels like diamond tiaras. Johnny Carson, Steven Spielberg and Sophia Loren bought apartments upstairs priced at up to $12 million.

The AIA Guide to New York City proclaimed Trump’s “fantasyland for the affluent shopper” as “flamboyant, exciting and emblematic of the American dream.”

Trump’s dream soon turned to laughs. It was ridiculed by architectural critics and abandoned by celebrity residents, who sold their pads to swindlers and felons. Glamorous stores and boutiques bailed out, too, leaving ordinary ones and empty space in their wake.

Now the last laugh belongs to Trump’s flagship tower. Thirty-four years later, the 68-story skyscraper can claim all the clout any bricks-and-mortar could want.

“We call it the Black House,” a waiter at the Armani restaurant across the street said of what’s now the most important address in the world. The question now is whether President Donald J. Trump can tear himself away from his beloved penthouse in the sky at 725 Fifth Ave. and downsize into the White House.

(continued)

[L'Emmerdeur]

Not too bad, considering the New York Post is a sensationalist tabloid rag. They neglected to mention, though, that Trump Tower rose from the debris of a callous act of cultural vandalism

The construction of Trump Tower may have been Donald Trump's greatest achievement, but it was a disaster for the city's artistic legacy.

To build his skyscraper, Trump first had to knock down the Bonwit Teller building, a luxurious limestone building erected in 1929. The face of the building featured two huge Art Deco friezes that the Metropolitan Museum of Art wanted to preserve. The museum asked Trump to save the sculptures and donate them, and the mogul agreed—as long as the cost of doing so wasn't too high.

But then, according to journalist Harry Hurt III in his book Lost Tycoon, Trump discovered that taking out the sculptures would delay demolition by two weeks. He wasn't willing to wait. "On his orders, the demolition workers cut up the grillwork with acetylene torches," Hurt wrote. "Then they jackhammered the friezes, dislodged them with crowbars, and pushed the remains inside the building, where they fell to the floor and shattered in a million pieces."

The art world was shocked. "Architectural sculpture of this quality is rare and would have made definite sense in our collections," Ashton Hawkins, the vice president and secretary of the Met's board of trustees, told the New York Times. Robert Miller, a gallery owner who had agreed to assess the friezes, told the paper that "the reliefs are as important as the sculptures on the Rockefeller building. They'll never be made again."

The Times reported that Trump also lost a large bronze grillwork, measuring 25 feet in length, from the building that the museum had hoped to save.

[mistermack]

American culture is disposable. It's designed that way.

Trashing it was a work of performance art.