architecture

What Was Trump Tower?

His co-star, his political launch pad, his longest-term companion.

Photo: Ernst Haas/Getty Images
Photo: Ernst Haas/Getty Images

His other buildings, of course, matter to Donald Trump. Anything expensive with his name on it does. Trump Tower, though — that one’s different. It’s the one that made him, the one he chose for his home and his office and his TV show and his campaign headquarters, the one where he descended the escalator in 2015 and subsequently brought a good part of the world down with him. And now he may lose it, as a lawsuit by Attorney General Letitia James attempts to cancel some of the Trump Organization’s business licenses.

If that happens, any new owner will almost surely remove the ten gold letters atop the entrance and call it something else. It will then join the Pan Am building, the RCA Building at Rockefeller Plaza, and the Triborough and Queensboro bridges on the list of structures whose old names linger long after a new sign goes up. It’s arguably not even his; the holder of the freshly refinanced mortgage is Axos, a California bank, but to everyone else, it’s Donald Trump’s building. It’s difficult to imagine what a second life for this one might be like. When RCA gave way to GE and then Comcast, it didn’t diminish anyone’s idea of RCA’s David Sarnoff or GE’s Jack Welch — it was just a new sign on the roof. At Trump Tower, we have an office building bound up in one guy. It’s an only slightly less loud public character than he is, a longer-term companion than any of his wives have been. Given a choice between one and the other, you can guess which he’d keep. Besides, without the Trump, what’s the tower? It’s 721–725 Fifth Avenue. Yawn.

Trump Tower was the building that moved Donald’s corporate address literally from Avenue Z to Fifth Avenue. His former office sits across from a Key Food and a laundromat; the current one faces Bergdorf Goodman and Bulgari. It set the template that many of his subsequent buildings followed, from Trump World Tower to Trump Tower Manila: Work with an unglamorous partner entity that puts in a lot of money (in this case, Equitable Life Assurance). Build tall, then inflate the number of floors. (Trump Tower’s atrium and offices are collectively 300 feet high; though they do not constitute 30 physical levels, he decided to start counting the residential floors at 30, and they top out at 68 instead of 58.) Wrap it in dark glass, and don’t skimp on the brass, bronze, or anything else golden. Put your name on the front, so nobody forgets who owns (some of) it. Make the letters big. No, bigger.

He’d been driving toward this project, and this moment, for years, writing a letter a month to the owners of Bonwit Teller, the department store on the site that by the late 1970s was in decline. It had been covetable land for much longer than that. Three-quarters of a century earlier, the northeast corner of Fifth and 56th had been the site of one of the great Fifth Avenue mansions, a château developed by the Astors and leased by the Anaconda Copper magnate Marcus Daly. His smelters were so toxic that he himself was gradually poisoned along with his workers, and Daly spent one of his first days in his newly completed home as a corpse, lying in repose. The house never really had much of a run after that — it was too big, in a neighborhood that was shifting from residential mansions to commerce — and before long it became an art gallery, then was torn down in the late 1920s to make way for the department store. After Bonwit’s was sold in 1979, Trump finally got it, and he demolished it in a manner that still has preservationists furious. And he did the job in an underhanded way, hiring undocumented Polish laborers to work long days without protection against the asbestos they hauled.

The topping-out party in July 1982, when the concrete reached the “68th” floor, was for 700 guests, especially the press Trump wanted to cultivate (including the cable host and future questionable-diet-supplement peddler Nikki Haskell) and the officials he already had cultivated. “May all who dwell within know only happiness,” Mayor Ed Koch said in his toast. “And may the windows of this building forever look out upon a place of peace and prosperity.” Governor Hugh Carey plumped for it as well. When Trump spoke, he smirked, “You know, there’s nothing wrong with being rich.” Most of the guests, noted the journalist Jonathan Mandell, were “the kind of people whose postures and manicures tell you they expect to be fawned upon … men in tuxedos and women with assisted blond hair and leopard-skin dresses.” Trump grudgingly also allowed a few of the tradesmen working on the building to attend. Mandell heard a plumber snort, “I’ve never been to a topping-of party so elaborate” as he eyed the chilled tortellini salad. “The guy’s got money to burn.” As with all things Trump, the image of excellence blurred if you looked close. The swag-bag coffee mug had the wrong date printed on it.

August 1980: Donald Trump, 33, shows off a model of his big building.


Under construction, circa 1981.

Trump and tower as topping-out approached, July 1982.

The finished building, with Charles Jourdan as retail tenant, 1990.

The setbacks serve as small terraces at the office level.

Photographs by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images, Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times/Redux, Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images, Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
August 1980: Donald Trump, 33, shows off a model of his big building.
Under construction, circa 1981.
Trump and tower, 1982.
The finished building, with Charles Jourdan as retail tenant, 1990.
The setbacks serve as small terraces at the office level.

August 1980: Donald Trump, 33, shows off a model of his big building.


Under construction, circa 1981.

Trump and tower as topping-out approached, July 1982.

The finished building, with Charles Jourdan as retail tenant, 1990.

The setbacks serve as small terraces at the office level.

Photographs by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images, Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times/Redux, Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images, Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

At the time, New York City was perceived as a dangerous, dirty place, and not without good reason. These were the “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD” years. The subways, under Richard Ravitch, were starting to come back from their nadir of bad service and slovenliness but were still a pretty broken-down experience. The murder rate had roughly tripled since the 1960s. Most of all, there was a dominant feeling that any change, and especially any new building, was probably a step down rather than up, aesthetically and otherwise.

The typical new residential tower, for the previous 30 years or so, had been built in the International Style, efficiently sheathed in glazed brick, typically brown or white or pale gray, in relatively characterless imitation of the handmade Bauhaus aesthetic. Even if you liked this architecture, a lot of it looked the same and not very interesting. People sometimes said that New York itself had basically priced itself out of having good architecture, because the land was so expensive that you could barely make a building pay off unless you skimped on style and ornament, on anything but the basics. So you’d get structures like Manhattan House, a huge white-brick postwar ziggurat on Third Avenue near 65th Street (Grace Kelly lived there) or 2 Fifth Avenue (Ed Koch’s home after his mayoralty), both of which were quite nice places to live. But put them next to a NYCHA tower or a big building in Stuyvesant Town, and although the quality was higher and the hallways nicer, the overall aesthetic, especially the exterior, was not vastly different. The upscale buyer generally had to make a choice between prewar buildings, which had ormolu fittings and ceiling rosettes and carved stonework, and postwar ones, which had lower ceilings and cardboard-y walls but at least had enough closets and plumbing that wasn’t aging into an expensive headache. The better prewars were often co-ops, requiring that buyers clear a board review to move in. That could and did exclude those with new money, questionable money, and (in some buildings) non-Wasp money.

With Trump Tower — and its predecessor, Olympic Tower, which had opened a few years earlier — a third way presented itself. You, the affluent owner of (let’s say) a firm that manufactured foam rubber or owned borax mines or something similarly prosaic, could now buy into a building that was neither prewar stuffy nor postwar blah. Trump Tower was, even to an amateur’s eye, architecture. Der Scutt, an American with an adopted quasi-European first name and a critics-be-damned attitude, had designed it. It had a distinctive form, with a sawtooth edge and setbacks. It would be framed in concrete rather than steel, making it better for apartments. (Steel buildings move and squeak more in the wind, sometimes enough to disturb residents’ sleep.) Perhaps it was not the Chrysler Building, but that, too, had been called gaudy and ridiculous when it was new and later became a beloved landmark owing to that very same jazzy exuberance. The hype worked, and people wanted in; by the time Trump Tower opened, more than half the units were sold.

Being Trump, he deployed all the superlatives he could. His prospectus called the building “Elegant. Sophisticated. Strictly beau monde … a spectacular environment of space and form.” The atrium in the lobby — which is required to be open to the public — was configured like a particularly fancy shopping mall, with a lot of creamy marble and bronze everywhere and a big waterfall. That, too, was familiar and comfortable to the holders of non-old money. The doormen, the New York Times said, were “dressed to guard Buckingham Palace: red military coat, gold braid, black bearskin hat, the works.” The cliché that Trump is a poor man’s idea of a rich man is perhaps true, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Plenty of actual rich people were weary of being told that brutalist bare concrete was the epitome of chic. (Tom Wolfe, snarking: “Has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested?”) Trump offered an alternative that was easier to appreciate.

Even architecture critics liked it, reservedly. Paul Goldberger, at the Times, genuinely liked the atrium: “warm, luxurious and even exhilarating.” The AIA Guide couldn’t make up its mind, describing it as “flamboyant, exciting, and emblematic of the American Dream” but also with “aesthetics … more akin to wine coolers than to Veuve Clicquot.” Ada Louise Huxtable, the most highly regarded of them all, called the overall form “dramatically handsome,” although she was far more tart about the finished building. There was griping about its scale, but it was built within the law; that was the city’s fault, not the builder’s. Mostly, people seemed grateful for a little urban pizzazz, even if it was a little schlocky up close.

Celebrity was a big ingredient. Steven Spielberg purchased an apartment together with Universal’s Sid Sheinberg, and they treated it as a corporate residence. Sophia Loren, Johnny Carson, and Fay Wray, the actress known for a complicated relationship with another New York architectural icon, also bought in. So did Liberace — how perfect is that? — and when he played Radio City in 1985, two years before his death, he held the after-party at Trump Tower. He and Trump surely understood one another, men from modest backgrounds who were seethingly hungry for money and fame and encrusted their lives with gold and sparkle. Michael Jackson, too, rented in the tower for a while, notably spending time there with Lisa Marie Presley in the weeks before the two married. Jackson and Trump, in fact, had paths that crossed often; one might call it a friendship, if that word can really be applied to someone as purely transactional as Trump.

Occasionally, it almost seemed that powerful New York, or at least gossip-column New York, was a small town orbiting around this one building. In the late 1990s, Spielberg would occasionally lend his apartment to Hillary Clinton when she needed a crash pad in the city. She slept on 62, Trump on 67, and you have to wonder whether there was elevator chat. At the time, remember, Trump was relatively apolitical, giving money to any politician whom he thought he might need to call upon for a favor, and over the next few years he often spoke admiringly of Clinton and her husband.

He also, at one point, floated a truly ridiculous rumor that Prince Charles and Princess Diana were on the verge of buying a place in Trump Tower. On its face it was absurd, if only because one of Charles’s hobbyhorses was an almost atavistic hatred of modern architecture. The palace denied it without equivocation. Nonetheless, it got into the papers — even the AP reported it — and, at least if you believe Trump’s later boasting, it stimulated interest in the building even further. John Barron, Trump’s gossip-stoking alter ego, was good at his job.

In the atrium, 1985.

Classy! Visitors were greeted with piano and violin, 1983.

Liberace, with boyfriend Cary James, arrives from his Radio City Music Hall concert for the after-party, 1985.

Trump at his desk on the 26th floor, 1987.

Photographs by Ernst Haas/Getty Images, Bettmann Archive/Getty Images, Walter McBride/Corbis via Getty Images, Joe McNally/Getty Images
In the atrium, 1985.
Classy! Visitors were greeted with piano and violin, 1983.
Liberace, with boyfriend Cary James, arrives from his Radio City Music Hall concert for the after-party, 1985.
Trump at his desk on the 26th floor, 1987.

In the atrium, 1985.

Classy! Visitors were greeted with piano and violin, 1983.

Liberace, with boyfriend Cary James, arrives from his Radio City Music Hall concert for the after-party, 1985.

Trump at his desk on the 26th floor, 1987.

Photographs by Ernst Haas/Getty Images, Bettmann Archive/Getty Images, Walter McBride/Corbis via Getty Images, Joe McNally/Getty Images

It’s impossible to confirm, but one suspects that Trump cut the famous people discounts to get them in, to give the building cachet and bolster the prices for everyone else. Trump certainly coddled his showcase condo owners, even when it meant doing a disservice to his own people. Carson once phoned Trump to demand that he fire two building employees who, he said, had stolen an expensive vicuña coat from his apartment. Trump suspected that they were innocent after questioning them but canned them anyway. Six months later, the coat turned up somewhere in Carson’s closet.

For the general public, though, a Trump one-bedroom at the initial offering started at about $500,000, which was roughly 50 percent more than one would pay for a comparable apartment in 100 United Nations Plaza, another Der Scutt condo open to buyers around that time. A relatively unpedigreed new one-bedroom condo on the Upper East Side, well away from Fifth Avenue, could be had for about a third as much.

Away from the Spielbergs and Carsons and Jacksons, a number of the noncelebrity buyers had made their money in questionable ways. For them, the apartments may have served as convenient cash-stashing devices. Wayne Barrett, in The Village Voice, wrote that they included Roberto Polo, a financier later jailed for swindling $110 million; Sheldon and Jay Weinberg, father-and-son Medicaid fraudsters; David Bogatin, a tax cheat with links to a Russian crime family; and Joe Weichselbaum, a helicopter-company operator and convicted coke dealer. Robert Hopkins, a Lucchese operative, was even arrested in his Trump Tower apartment for ordering a hit (though the charge was dismissed) and running a gambling ring (convicted).

And what did all the buyers, whether fancy or felonious, get? Great light, usually, owing to the building’s height over most of its neighbors. Less-than-great nine-foot ceilings. Never-quite-luxurious fixtures that dated quickly. A modest galley kitchen, typically windowless. Formica counters. Standard GE appliances. (The only nice big kitchen was Spielberg’s, because he and his people had called Trump personally and, after a lot of back-and-forth, wheedled him into rerouting all the plumbing.) The finishes were nothing like the two-acres-of-Calacatta-marble-on-the-kitchen-island extravaganzas that compete for luxury buyers now. Trump believed that his buyers were usually going out to dinner, and that most of them and their decorators would rip out whatever he installed anyhow. He even chose the kitchen cabinets for their particular ease of removal. These choices also meant that he could save a few bucks and, sometimes, carve out extra rooms per floor, which was great for the bottom line. (Philip Birnbaum, an architect who worked on the building, made a near-fetish of this interior efficiency.) There are a lot of one- and two-bedroom apartments in Trump Tower, and quite a few of the one-bedrooms measure about 1,100 square feet — fine, but not truly spacious. Go look at a superluxury building today, like the supertalls of 57th Street, and there are virtually no small units like that, apart from a few meant for guests and servants. The sell here was the location and the packaging, not the living space itself. The business plan was to offer a skim coat of high quality where it was highly visible (the marble lobby, the bronze in the elevators) and skimping on less visible places. Virtually all developers do that to a degree; Trump excelled at it.

Even though selling the top three floors would have netted him a lot of money, Trump kept them for himself. You’ll probably be surprised when you see their original décor. The great Angelo Donghia did them in a high-drama 1980s noir style, and while you wouldn’t call them restrained, they are frankly kind of great. They play with rather than push back against the building’s marble-and-bronze vibe, and they are showy but not absurd. Only after a visit to a czarist palace a few years later did he remake the penthouse into the ridiculous dictator-chic apartment we’ve all encountered in photographs (including those below). Being triple-height and spacious, it did not feel as basic as the rest of the building’s apartments, although it too had lowish ceilings, and the encrustation of Versailles-wannabe ornament did not do anything to make it feel roomier. He must have loved the way it came out, because it remains virtually unchanged nearly 40 years later, maintained as an artifact even if he is virtually always in Florida or at Bedminster or bellowing at a rally in Iowa.

Flogging The Apprentice, 2004. Trump didn’t bother to get a permit for the signage and was hit with $10,000 in fines.

In his 66th-floor living room, 2009.

Apprentice applicants, 2006.

Photographs by Henry Lamb/BEI/Shutterstock, Ben Baker/Redux, M. Von Holden/FilmMagic
Flogging The Apprentice, 2004. He didn’t bother to get a permit for the signage and was hit with $10,000 in fines.
In his 66th-floor living room, 2009.
Apprentice applicants, 2006.

Flogging The Apprentice, 2004. Trump didn’t bother to get a permit for the signage and was hit with $10,000 in fines.

In his 66th-floor living room, 2009.

Apprentice applicants, 2006.

Photographs by Henry Lamb/BEI/Shutterstock, Ben Baker/Redux, M. Von Holden/FilmMagic

During that time, Trump’s fortunes have waned, waxed, waned again, and come roaring back. The real pivotal event was the success of The Apprentice, and Trump Tower was his co-star. The building served as a synecdoche for his wealth and power in establishing shots, and the show played out within a mocked-up Trump Organization boardroom and in fake Trump Tower apartments, both of them constructed within the tower on one floor, separate from the real thing. New Yorkers knew Trump by this time as a has-been developer, mostly licensing his name and trading on his past. The rest of America, though, knew him only vaguely, as a rich guy whose name was on a Fifth Avenue tower in gold letters. When the show aired, he got to reboot his fame, and it is not vastly overstating things to say that this tall bronzed co-star of his was instrumental in his latter-day revival. Trump Tower made him a player in New York, and then much later helped to make him a player everywhere else, and that second act is significantly responsible for the unraveling of the American republic that we have been living through since 2016. That June, Trump, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and Don Jr. met with a clutch of Russians to talk about getting dirt on Hillary Clinton. The gathering has its own Wikipedia page, titled “Trump Tower meeting.

Like Trump himself in many ways, Trump Tower aged in place through the early 2000s and 2010s, their looks calcifying, the building and the man simultaneously losing whatever worldliness they had. Today, it’s a fossil, a 1980s luxury building in the 2020s. The world of the very rich has changed, and this building has, to a great extent, not. The location is unbeatable, but owing to the apartments’ scale, their datedness, and perhaps to the name out front, the premium they once carried is now modest at best. The median sale in central midtown last month was $1,437 per square foot. The most recent closed sale in the building, apartment 39B, was a two-bedroom place with a rather plain renovation, and it went for $2.3 million. That price is exactly $1,437 per square foot. (The same apartment sold for $3.75 million in 2016.) The Trump premium, in this sale, was zero.

You don’t have to see an apartment to spot the downscaling. The signifiers are right there at ground-floor level. For one thing, there’s only one retail tenant left. Around 2006, the 56th Street corner of Trump Tower was “updated” with a swath of rippled whitish glass replacing the dark glazing, presumably to make it brighter and more Apple Store–cheery inside. It disfigured the building, which was, whether you liked it or not, aesthetically unified and cohesive and now looks bandaged. Nonetheless, it worked: Gucci came in and stuck around, although one reason for the long stay has been a deep rent discount. The big retail space around the corner that is connected to Trump Tower — first Galeries Lafayette, then for many years Niketown, then Tiffany & Co.’s temporary space while its store was renovated — is empty once again, mostly because of general business conditions but also owing to Trump’s toxicity.

Inside the atrium, it’s even more bleak. In its earlier years, Trump Tower housed Ludwig Beck, Asprey, Botticelli, Buccellati, and Charles Jourdan boutiques. They’re all long gone, as are their somewhat less upscale successors. Even the Starbucks has moved out. Some of that exodus is surely a result of security measures during Trump’s four years in office, because you had to thread your way among some tough-looking folks and concrete barriers to shop, and nobody enjoys that. Not to mention that a lot of people simply will no longer spend a cent anywhere in that building.

Some go further than refusing to spend. Protesters have treated Trump Tower as a useful backdrop for years, certainly since 2016. Much as Trump himself had used the tower for that permit-less Apprentice advertisement, so did the abortion-rights activists who projected their message on or next to the façade. Whenever he was in New York, he was greeted by shouts and signs. When he wasn’t, his building stood in for him, and press photographers, almost on demand, could catch people with signs under those ten golden letters. That, too, has to have discouraged retail foot traffic.

The clientele, 2016.

Merch (where, by law, a public bench is supposed to be), 2015.

Souvenirs for sale, 2015.

The infamous announcement, June 2015.

Guarded during the Labor Day parade, September 2017.

During Trump’s presidency, shoppers had to clear security to enter.

Kanye West shows up during the transition, December 2016.

NYPD in the lobby, December 2016.

Kellyanne Conway addresses the press from the lobby as the president-elect holds meetings upstairs, November 2016.

Protesters outside the day after the 2016 election.

The NYPD arrests pro-DACA protesters, 2017.

The media scrum as Trump makes one of his increasingly rare visits to his former home base, April 3, 2023.

Photographs by Carlo Allegri/Reuters/Redux, Piotr Redlinski/The New York Times/Redux, Daniel Biskup/laif/Redux, Todd Heisler/The New York Times/Redux, EuropaNewswire/Gado/Getty Images, Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images, John Taggart/UPI/Shutterstock, Justin Lane/EPA/Shutterstock, Aude Guerrucci/Pool/ABACA/Shutterstock, Xinhua/Shutterstock, Drew Angerer/Getty Images, Scott Olson/Getty Images
The clientele, 2016.
Merch (where, by law, a public bench is supposed to be), 2015.
Souvenirs for sale, 2015.
The infamous announcement, June 2015.
Guarded during the Labor Day parade, September 2017.
During Trump’s presidency, shoppers had to clear security to enter.
Kanye West shows up during the transition, December 2016.
NYPD in the lobby, December 2016.
Kellyanne Conway addresses the press from the lobby as the president-elect holds meetings upstairs, November 2016.
Protesters outside the day after the 2016 election.
The NYPD arrests pro-DACA protesters, 2017.
The media scrum as Trump makes one of his increasingly rare visits to his former home base, April 3, 2023.

The clientele, 2016.

Merch (where, by law, a public bench is supposed to be), 2015.

Souvenirs for sale, 2015.

The infamous announcement, June 2015.

Guarded during the Labor Day parade, September 2017.

During Trump’s presidency, shoppers had to clear security to enter.

Kanye West shows up during the transition, December 2016.

NYPD in the lobby, December 2016.

Kellyanne Conway addresses the press from the lobby as the president-elect holds meetings upstairs, November 2016.

Protesters outside the day after the 2016 election.

The NYPD arrests pro-DACA protesters, 2017.

The media scrum as Trump makes one of his increasingly rare visits to his former home base, April 3, 2023.

Photographs by Carlo Allegri/Reuters/Redux, Piotr Redlinski/The New York Times/Redux, Daniel Biskup/laif/Redux, Todd Heisler/The New York Times/Redux, EuropaNewswire/Gado/Getty Images, Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images, John Taggart/UPI/Shutterstock, Justin Lane/EPA/Shutterstock, Aude Guerrucci/Pool/ABACA/Shutterstock, Xinhua/Shutterstock, Drew Angerer/Getty Images, Scott Olson/Getty Images

We might have seen the atrium turn into a Fifth Avenue version of the dead mall but for visitors from Red America. These days, practically the whole thing is a shrine to a one-term president, one that his adherents attend as pilgrims. The Trump Store, occupying a small kiosk on the main lobby level and a larger shop one flight down, sells the infamous baseball caps, doodads like challenge coins, and golf shirts and boxers bearing his name — also, curiously, small Trump Tower–branded candy bars labeled “Chocolate Thoughts.” Tourists pass through in large numbers, sometimes in red hats. Teetotalers or visitors with children can stop at Trump’s Ice Cream Parlor, or, if their tastes are more like (allegedly) Rudy Giuliani’s, they can hit the bar. At 45 Wine & Whiskey, one can nurse an old-fashioned served with two sliders, ketchup, and a Diet Coke — a special called the Forty-Five that costs, of course, $45 — next to a big “45” logo on the wall that sorta-kinda evokes the presidential seal. (He can’t legally use the real one in commerce.) This Saturday afternoon, a few people sat at the mezzanine coffee bar, speaking quietly. The terrace-level public space was closed after the heavy rain, a guard told me, and would reopen the next morning. The upper levels of the atrium, once filled with high-end retail, were roped off. The Trump Store was open but deserted when I walked in, with no customers and also no clerk behind the register. The whole place, from door to bar to shop, was muted, as if something had gone wrong, and I suppose it had.

What Was Trump Tower?