Trump, page 46
Barwick had not so much changed his view of the historic significance of Rizzoli or Coty as he had changed his role—as director of the Society, his constituency was fiercely opposed to the shadowy bulk of the new buildings crowding the choicest blocks of Fifth Avenue. To Barwick and Trump, landmarking the buildings was simply a strategic way of preventing the construction of a new tower in their place. They were perfectly prepared to use the landmarking process to stop development that the zoning laws clearly allowed, a spot-zoning perversion the Times condemned in an editorial as “snatching a building from an unsuspecting builder’s grasp.”
Before Allen Schwartz joined the war, Barwick had visited a deputy mayor and other top city officials, none of whom favored landmarking the buildings. Barwick interpreted the City Hall position as in part the result of Lindenbaum’s influence and believed Schwartz could serve as a “counterbalance,” giving the Society someone “they would pay attention to, who would hit back.” Barwick also hired an architectural historian, who discovered what Barwick called “the hook” that helped them block the project: molded glass on the second- and third-floor windows of the Coty that had come from the workshop of Rene Lalique, a twentieth-century master of glass design.
The city, which had already issued a building permit for the alteration or demolition of the Rizzoli building and subsequently issued one for the Coty, was suddenly pushed by Schwartz to schedule a landmark hearing. The very officials who’d been resistant to Barwick in the beginning, from the deputy mayor to the top Buildings Department staff, were now reconsidering. By the time the hearing occurred in early 1985, the behind-the-scenes battle had become such an explicit contest of wills between Trump and the Travelstead group that Howard Rubenstein, the public relations titan who represented both, dropped the Travelstead project as a client, citing a conflict of interest.
Schwartz hovered over the January hearing, posing as the champion of a civic crusade, while he was, in fact, the agent of a spurned investor and turf-conscious competitor. When he spoke, he invoked the authority of the city as if he were still its lawyer. Attacking the building permit granted Travelstead, he claimed that the application for it had been misleading. “We have asked the Corporation Counsel to review that application,” Schwartz declared, referring to his own old office. “And I have been told that you should be told that the Corporation Counsel is presently reviewing it” to determine if the misrepresentation he alleged would be a sufficient grounds “to warrant the revocation of the permit.”
Although the Travelstead group offered to preserve the Lalique windows but relocate them inside the building, the Landmarks Commission rejected that compromise, stamping both buildings with an indelible landmark status. The irony was that Donald, the onetime “aesthetic vandal” of Trump Tower, had successfully transformed himself into a patron of Fifth Avenue.
The developers considered filing an appeal to overturn the landmarking at the Board of Estimate, but Trump’s imperial power on the Board, especially his influence with Andrew Stein, Donald Manes, and Stanley Friedman, discouraged them. So they fought on at the Landmarks Commission, eventually negotiating a compromise that permitted the construction of a fifty-six-story tower to be built behind the preserved Rizzoli and Coty façades. Set back fifty feet from Fifth Avenue and with a main entrance on 56th Street, the new tower was still a triumph for Trump. While the skyscraper would block the view from Trump Tower, it was far less a threat as a retail competitor for the Atrium, having lost the dominant Fifth Avenue retail frontage that was initially planned.
When David Solomon, a Travelstead partner, bumped into Trump at a party after the war, Donald could not resist reminding him of his still covert role, and, with a smile on his face, teased him about “the hard time” he’d given him. The landmarking fight delayed construction for two years, making the project too late for the boom market. Travelstead eventually got out of it, and when the building opened in 1991 it was virtually an empty shell.
At the same time that Schwartz was busily lobbying City Hall on the Travelstead project in late 1984 and early 1985, he also began making calls and nudging for city concessions on the West Side yards. His primary agenda was to lay the groundwork for Donald’s abandonment of the amenity burden, especially the $31 million payment due soon to pay for a renovation of the 72nd Street subway station near the site. This subway payment was a particularly difficult obligation to shed since the city had insisted in 1982 that it be written into the legal documents so that it literally ran with the land, and would be transferred with the title to any new owner. Schwartz’s efforts to win a waiver of that obligation were aided by Trump’s other, widely respected, lawyer, Steve Lefkowitz, who was also known in the development community as the best friend and traveling companion of Herb Sturz, the chairman of the City Planning Commission. The combination was a one-two punch no other developer in the city had.
But there was a fly in the ointment. Sturz’s counsel, Phil Hess, had a long, personal history with Trump, dating back to the days of the easement battle, and he was a stickler for propriety. He also had Sturz’s strong support. Having heard by phone and read in the newspapers about the upcoming sale to Trump, Hess drafted an early January letter that warned Trump he had to get the city’s consent for the purchase and put Trump on notice that he would have to make the subway payment by January 31. Since both of these requirements were a result of Board of Estimate resolutions, not those of the planning commission, Hess met and discussed the letter with Hadley Gold, the counsel to the Board who also held the title of first assistant to the corporation counsel. The Hess letter was prepared for Gold’s signature with a carbon copy to be sent Allen Schwartz, who had promoted Gold to his top corporation counsel status during his tenure there. Gold never sent the letter.*
Once the deal closed, Hess tried to rally administration officials to enforce the unequivocal amenity requirements, but he was up against pressure from Schwartz at all levels of the government. Trump’s strategy was to let Macri’s mapping agreement lapse, which it did in February, and to return Macri’s 4,300-unit special permit to the city, which he did on March 1. Then he announced his intention to submit an entirely new plan, contending that the amenity obligations died with the old permit and that he’d negotiate an alternate set of new subway or other improvements when his revised plan was approved.
The feisty Hess countered by pointing out that Trump had been at least orally “on notice since last fall that any purchaser would have to comply” with the notification and transfer process and that only the Board of Estimate could decide to waive requirements it had enacted. Hess pushed to have Donald’s evasion of the Macri obligations added to the Board’s calendar or at least informally put before each Board member individually. He drafted another letter for Gold’s signature, informing Trump that the “attempted surrender” of the Macri permit required Board approval before it could be accepted and that the matter would be placed before the members soon. Gold did not send that letter either.
But City Hall could not simply stonewall the Hess issues without running a political risk. By April, Carol Bellamy, the city’s second highest elected official and a member of the Board of Estimate, was an announced candidate against Koch and taking him on almost daily over a variety of issues. City Hall’s fear was that Bellamy—with strong reform support and a natural West Side constituency—would use any Koch acquiescence on the subway issue to paint him as soft on Trump, a potentially damaging image among the liberal Democrats who turned out in primaries. So top Koch deputies carved out a safe way of taking the onus off the mayor, yet putting the issue in limbo. Hadley Gold finally composed a mild version of the Phil Hess letters, but instead of sending a stern rebuke to Trump, he gave Bellamy and every other Board member a long-winded memo detailing in the blandest language the history of the transfer and subway controversies.
The letter posed no policy alternatives, but implicitly left it up to the Board to decide on further action. A mayoral aide followed the letter with calls to top staff of several key Board members asking what they wished to do. Bellamy responded with a blistering letter to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, stating flatly that Trump had assumed Macri’s subway commitments and that no delays should be granted him to avoid payment of the $31 million. Her response, and a rushed follow-up from Koch two days later, helped kill negotiations between the MTA and Trump to make a new subway deal that would lock in Donald’s subway commitment but postpone it far into the development process.
Predictably, no member of the Board other than Bellamy even responded to Gold’s letter, implicitly granting Trump a pass on the binding language of their own 1982 resolutions without even discussing it. The most hypocritical Board member was Andrew Stein, the only one to actually vote against Macri’s project and attack it for being too big. The Gold letter gave him an opportunity to object to a sale of the site to a developer who openly said he planned to double the size of the project, and Stein was silent. Of course, Stein was in the middle of a campaign to replace Bellamy as council president and $270,000 in Trump contributions to his campaign that year (combined with another $45,000 from Trump’s partner Hirschfeld) would set an all-time record for any Board of Estimate candidate.
In addition to Stein, Trump gave Comptroller Jay Goldin $30,000 in several donations, starting shortly after the West Side purchase closed, and $12,000 to Brooklyn Borough President Howard Golden. He also dumped bales of money into Stanley Friedman’s party coffers in the Bronx, contributed to the Staten Island borough president, and, of course, could always count on his unopposed ally, Donald Manes.
When the Board did nothing, the issue faded away, except for a single outburst in mid-August from the independent Herb Sturz and Phil Hess, the only city officials paying any attention to Trump’s disregard of his inherited obligations. Sturz reiterated his refusal even to look privately at the preliminary plans Trump had for the site, saying he would not do so until Trump complied with the transfer and subway obligations. Sturz said he was not accepting the special permit Trump had returned to the city months earlier and insisted that he submit a financial statement and comply with the transfer procedures in the Lincoln West resolutions. There was no reaction from Donald to this letter, almost as if he understood that Sturz’s edict would not stand.
Donald waited patiently, delaying the public announcement of his long-completed architectural design for the site until after the elections, thus sparing his candidates the uneasiness of having to take a public position in the middle of a campaign. Schwartz meanwhile quietly shifted the outstanding transfer and subway issues away from Hess and Sturz to City Hall, where a showdown session was scheduled in the mayor’s office immediately after the election. The upshot of that meeting was a decision to deliberately leave the issue in limbo—to neither press for compliance nor to put any waiver of the city’s rights in writing. This supposedly neutral position actually suited Trump quite nicely and was an extraordinary tribute to Schwartz’s clout and persuasiveness. Donald would, in fact, never make the subway contribution or pay the cost of any other Macri commitment, escaping from these obligations without attracting any critical media attention.*
Even before this capitulation, another wing of city government had begun actively entertaining Trump’s West Side proposal. On September 11, the day after Koch’s primary victory over Bellamy, Donald had met with Koch’s top economic development officials, including Deputy Mayor Alair Townsend, to discuss city assistance in relocating NBC from its historic Rockefeller Center headquarters to the 60th Street yards. A cocksure Trump told the assembled bureaucrats that unless the city acted, a cramped NBC might move to New Jersey or to Burbank, where the network had a great deal of extra acreage. Grant Tinker, NBC’s president, “doesn’t like New York City because he has to wear a tie here,” Trump teased.
Trump argued that he had the only site in the city suitable for major new television studios and that he had worked out a deal with the network giving it a third of his site. “NBC is in love with it,” he said, claiming that the network had been designing its own facility for the property over the past three months. Asked by Townsend how strong a commitment Trump had from NBC, Donald replied: “We’re negotiating the terms of a lease.”
Donald’s strategy was to act as if he were NBC’s exclusive agent, knowing that the city desperately wanted to retain the network’s thousands of jobs, and then to convince the administration to grant him zoning bonuses and tax abatements for the whole site so he could afford to offer the network a sweetheart deal on its portion of it. “I don’t want the mayor to confuse the issue by bringing up other sites,” said Trump. “Nothing else in Manhattan does it.” If the city would agree to a dramatically upscaled rezoning, Trump would give NBC an immediate equity interest in its building and a buyout provision up the road. The city, he said, should offer NBC utility write-downs and financing incentives, including low-cost loans, to tie the package together.
To underline the seriousness of NBC’s threatened departure, Trump then sent Townsend a confidential copy of the network’s request for proposals for a competitive site in New Jersey’s Meadowlands. With help from Schwartz, Donald was trying an end run around Sturz, Hess, and the traditional planning apparatus, and instead focusing on the much more pliant development agencies. Trump also began sending personal notes to Koch, advocating the yards as the only alternative to “all the large developments planned on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River” and promising to “beat them all if the City lets me.” In a November 12 note to Koch, Donald first floated his notion of “the World’s Tallest Building” for the site and appealed to the mayor’s public contempt for the antidevelopment left. “While it is possible that a small and vocal group will be against such a building,” Trump wrote, “the City as a whole will be overwhelmingly for it.”
Two weeks after Koch and all the Trump-backed candidates for the Board won, and barely a week after the issues raised by Hess were put to rest in that City Hall meeting, Donald held a grand press conference to make public his long-awaited plan. The announcement made Dan Rather’s CBS Evening News, took up an entire page in the New York Times with reaction sidebars and a Paul Goldberger architecture review, and became a lead national story. Donald Trump, at thirty-nine, was literally about to reach the sky.
Trump’s 150-story building was, his architect, Helmut Jahn, said, actually a system of five buildings mounted atop one another and supported by “a giant superframe” that would form the angles of a triangle. Skyscrapers over 100 stories, Goldberger wrote, “make sense only for the kind of builder who is as concerned with symbolizing power as he is with the specifics of his cash flow, and no builder today more perfectly fits this criterion than Mr. Trump, a man who glories in superlatives and for whom every project is a flamboyant gesture.”
Seven other buildings, including six seventy-six-story apartment complexes, would stretch out across the waterfront. While Macri had tried to build high-rise and medium-height buildings on relatively conventional streets—an extension of the Manhattan grid—Donald’s Television City was the reverse, a collection of 8,000 apartments, plus two office buildings, on a huge landscaped platform with a vast amount of open space and parkland. Beneath the platform were the studios, designed to tempt Hollywood as well as NBC, a retail mall with two or three major department stores, and a massive parking garage. While Goldberger adopted Trump’s sales pitch that his was the only site with the horizontal space necessary for modern studios, he assailed the towers as “completely out of scale with conventional human perception.”
Flanked by nine photographic blowups and a model of his plan in the Empire Ballroom of the Grand Hyatt, Trump was asked at his press conference why he wanted to outdo the Sears Building in Chicago. “We are prone to go forward” was all he could say. Promising to submit his plan to the city in January 1986, Trump said portions of it had been previewed by the mayor, who was away on a trip to Japan. No city official commented on Trump’s vision, though it contained almost twice the number of apartments and parking spaces as well as four times the office and commercial square footage as the plan that had finally been approved for Macri.
Koch had expressly declined a New York Times request to comment on Trump’s announced intention of a larger project when asked during the campaign, and now, with the plan formally unveiled, the mayor who had an opinion about everything remained uncharacteristically silent. His silence was just one more indication that Koch had some sort of understanding with Donald—preceded by the condoning of the sale without city notification and the abandonment of the subway improvements. Koch had obviously not discouraged Trump from announcing the plan even after he’d previewed it. Indeed, a few weeks later, while Trump and the mayor were still exchanging public praise, Donald was quoted in the New York Post as saying that Koch “tacitly, at least, supports the project.” Koch, Trump said, “came out the other day and said: ‘I love Donald Trump as a developer,’ which was nice. Then he said: ‘And I would love to have the tallest building in New York.’ That’s about as close to an endorsement as you can get.” Koch didn’t deny any of it.*
No one could have been more astonished at these developments than Francisco Macri, who still had an office in New York and was wrapping up the loose ends of his Lincoln West operation. While he could get nowhere with the city on the amenities or the density of his project, Donald seemed to be magically winning at every turn. He was also going out of his way to brand Macri a “know-nothing” and “a myth who’s now safely back in Argentina.”
“Every time I have anything to negotiate with the city,” a victorious Trump declared, “they say: ‘Mr. Macri agreed to rebuild the subway system. Mr. Macri agreed to build a railroad yard.’ And I say: ‘You don’t understand. He didn’t know what he was doing.’” The day would come, of course, when Donald would himself be ridiculed for buying a site whose rezoning he did not want and then spending millions on a project so grandiose it was unlikely it would ever be built.
