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Strictly Beau Monde

By Syd on 07/03/2018 in Donald Trump

By Sydney H. Schanberg

Originally published in the New York Times, December 18, 1982

The state’s highest court scolded the city government this week for having denied a tax abatement to the glass and steel creation of Donald Trump, master builder — the structure that he calls, interchangeably, the Trump Tower or ”the world’s most talked about address.”

The Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that the city had gone beyond the law and used arbitrary reasons in deciding that young Trump’s 68-story edifice at Fifth Avenue and 56th Street did not qualify for having $20 million written off its tax bill. The seven judges told the Koch administration to go back and think it over and do the right thing for ”the world’s most talked about address.”

Sad to report, however, the city is behaving mean-spiritedly and is now looking for new ways to thwart the great builder and hold on to the tax money for the support of patently less important addresses — such as the Men’s Shelter and Bellevue Hospital.

Don’t the Koch people have any sense of gratitude for the uplift this visionary is giving our town? Don’t they realize that we will all be basking in the renascent glow from the shiny people who are buying the 263 condominiums in the Trump Tower at prices ranging from an embarrassing $500,000 for the economy one-bedroom unit up to $10 million for the premiere penthouse triplex in the stars?

I think it’s best to let the building’s prospectus and purring brochures speak for themselves: ”Imagine a tall bronze tower of glass. Imagine life within such a tower. Elegant. Sophisticated. Strictly beau monde. ”It’s been fifty years at least since people could actually live at this address. They were Astors. And the Whitneys lived just around the corner. And the Vanderbilts across the street.

”You approach the residential entrance — an entrance totally inaccessible to the public — and your staff awaits your arrival. Your concierge gives you your messages. And you pass through the lobby.

”Quickly, quietly, the elevator takes you to your floor and your elevator man sees you home. ”You turn the key and wait a moment before clicking on the light. ”A quiet moment to take in the view – wall-to-wall, floor-toceiling – New York at dusk. The sky is pink and gray. Thousands of tiny lights are snaking their way through Central Park. Bridges are becoming jeweled necklaces. ”Your diamond in the sky. It seems a fantasy. And you are home.

”Maid service, valet, laundering and dry cleaning, stenographers, interpreters, multilingual secretaries, Telex and other communications equipment, hairdressers, masseuses, limousines, helicopters, conference rooms — all at your service with a phone call to your concierge.

”If you can think of any amenity, any extravagance or nicety of life, any service we haven’t mentioned, then it probably hasn’t been invented yet.”

And can you believe it? The Mayor is trying to make life difficult for these people. Trying to cast a pall over their amenities. Trying to take away $20 million of their extravagances.

What kind of grinch would want to hassle that anonymous wage-earner who has purchased Triplex N for $10 million? Perched on the top three floors, Triplex N has (and this is but a partial list): ”five bedrooms, seven bathrooms, skylit garden/playroom, roof terrace, (interior) elevator serving all floors of the unit … unlike anything you’ve ever seen … wraparound views of Manhattan … sculptured staircases … sumptuous tubs … his and her bathing suites … worthy only of the world’s most talked about address.”

City Hall is trying to argue that the 1971 state law authorizing tax abatements for new residential construction was designed to stimulate the creation of low- and middle-income housing, not units that are ”unlike anything you’ve ever seen.” (The median rent in other buildings currently receiving such write-offs from the city is $465 a month. The ”carrying charge” alone on Triplex N is about $3,400 a month.) The court said there was nothing in the statute’s language that makes such a distinction.

The court is right — if we start discriminating against the rich, then who’ll be next? Donald Trump couldn’t agree more. He took all the risks, after all. He raised the $200 million to build the tower. Is he now to be penalized because the condominiums on the top 38 floors — which are in such sumptuous demand that he’s raised the prices four times since the sales office opened a year ago — will bring him $300 million (not to mention the revenue from the 18 retail and commercial floors)? What’s wrong with a reasonable profit?

What would the city do with young Trump’s $20 million, anyway? They’d just spend it on more cops and sanitation workers and subway repairmen. Who’s going to need cops and street sweepers and subway mechanics if young Trump keeps getting tax abatements and keeps building these swell apartments? Pretty soon, there’ll be so much housing that we’ll all be able to live strictly beau monde.

Now do you realize how important this issue is? Don’t drag your feet any longer — write to the Mayor immediately and tell him to lay off Donald Trump.

The Killer-Idea Menace

By Syd on 07/03/2018 in About New York

By Sydney H. Schanberg

Originally published in The New York Times, June 12, 1982

Is our brain fiber so eroded by Perrier water and our spine so softened by beanbag chairs that we can no longer do battle with ideas from an alien galaxy? Can we rise anymore to a challenge? Is this the Big Apple – or only a rotten nectarine?

These knotty questions arise because the anti-Red brigade in the State and Justice Departments has blocked over 300 foreigners from coming to the United Nations disarmament session on the grounds that they are Soviet dupes with alien ideas, bent on capturing our hearts and minds.

I say let them in. We can handle them. Does Lawrence Eagleburger, the State Department official who seems to worry most about these aliens and their little red books, really think they would be any match for Mayor Koch, Donald Trump, the Financial Control Board, Vito Battista, Rosemary Gunning and The Wall Street Journal? Do they stand a chance against George Steinbrenner, gypsy cabs without springs, the West Side IRT and deli waiters whose insults would wither Lenin himself?

Anyway, these intruders have long since been tamed into submission by our jungle. They’ve been coming here for years without hindrance from Eagleburger, and all their invidious sowing of anti-American ideas hasn’t made the slightest dent in the Laffer Curve.

Hundreds of these now-proscribed people — such as members of the Japanese group, Gensuikyo — came to the first United Nations disarmament session in 1978; and all they left behind were some sandals discarded for Guccis and their welcome contributions to the sales tax.

Now I do realize that all Communists are not benign, that this country has adversaries and that we must be vigilant and militarily prepared. But in my experience, that very real problem has virtually nothing to do with people hawking ideas. It has to do, rather, with dictatorships seeking to amass world power and dominate others. Hitler, as far as I know, was not a member of the World Peace Council or its purported affiliate, Gensuikyo, which have got the Eagleburger aerie so stirred up.

”They are undesirable,” says Kenneth Adelman, our No. 2 delegate at the U.N. ”We have absolutely no legal obligation to let Tommy Bulgaria or anyone else from Soviet-front groups come here, participate in demonstrations, get on air time and do the Soviet Government’s work for it.”

I don’t know Tommy Bulgaria, but my contacts with Communists — in my reporting tours overseas – suggest that it is not subversion through ideas that we should fear. It is paralysis through boredom.

At their worst, these Communists were droning ideologues, all of whom should have been on retainer for the National Association of Insomniacs. At their devious best, they were masters at honing their rhetoric into a weapon akin to water-drip torture.

I recall the arrival in April 1975 of the victorious Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh, where they were nervously awaited by five Russians left behind in the Soviet Embassy with the sole mission of making friendly contact with their new Cambodian ”comrades.” The Mao-oriented Khmer Rouge were having none of it. They tore down the Soviet flag, stomped on Brezhnev’s picture, fired a rocket into the building and then, in the ultimate assault, forced the Russians to stay up all night and engage in a debate on Marxism-Leninism.

By morning, the Russian will had been sapped. Defeated and glazed of eye, they packed up their canned black bread and sour cream and drove, humiliated, to the French Embassy, where all the other foreigners had taken sanctuary.

New Yorkers are tougher than those Russians. The denizens of Elaine’s or Ruelles stay up all night discussing drivel far more mind-numbing than Hegelian dialectic and emerge into the morning sunlight without a wrinkle in their beautiful-people personas.

And beyond Elaine’s for a moment, perhaps the strongest evidence of our country’s advantage over the Soviet Union is that this conference, with its marches and open-air rallies, could never be held in Moscow, where fear of outside ideas results in their suppression. Our openness is our greatest strength. It’s a pity that the sky-is-falling bureaucrats in Washington are too insecure to understand this.

In their paranoia, they dug deep into their cold-war bins to dust off the hoary and hysterical McCarran Act of 1952, which sought to close our doors and ears to ideas other than our own.

It’s a good thing the statute applies only to aliens, because in addition to ”subversives,” it also excludes ”chronic alcoholics” and those suffering from ”moral turpitude.” Can you imagine, under those standards, how many members of Congress returning from junkets could be barred re-entry to our shores? I say that for better or worse, we should remain tolerant and continue to let our Congressmen into the country — along with members of the World Peace Council, tedious and undesirable as some of them may be.

Doer and Slumlord Both

By Syd on 02/23/2016 in Donald Trump

Donald Trump, 1985 - Press of Atlantic City via Beyond the Killing Fields

Donald Trump in 1985

By Sydney H. Schanberg

This first appeared as an Op-Ed column in The New York Times on March 9, 1985

Donald Trump, the developer, is in the newspapers almost every day for one thing or another. If he isn’t building a skyscraper castle or a football team, he is trying to harass some tenants out of one of his properties.

It’s strange for a young man who so craves achievement, recognition, respectability and acceptance to mix into his master-builder activities the petty act of abusing tenants. Yet, though hard to explain, there seems little doubt that it has happened. Both the city and the state, in detailed papers, have brought actions against him for mistreatment of tenants — the state in an administrative proceeding and the city in a lawsuit seeking heavy fines.

The case involves the rather nice 15-story building at 100 Central Park South, overlooking the park. He bought it in 1981 with the intention of tearing it and the adjacent building down (the Barbizon Plaza, which he also owns) and replacing them with another of his mega-luxury towers. The curious thing about his plans is that he knew that the building was pretty much fully occupied and that the apartments were protected by either rent control or rent stabilization.

The city and state papers allege that Mr. Trump and his agents proceeded to try to force out the 60 or more tenants by the following tactics: ”threats of imminent demolition,” ”spurious litigation,” ”drastic decreases in essential services,” ”persistent delay in repairing defective conditions with life-threatening potential,” ”instructing employees to obtain information about the private lives (and) sex habits of the tenants,” and ”engaging in a psychological tug- of-war to wear the tenants down which has had a deleterious effect upon the health and well-being of said tenants, many of whom are elderly and are particularly vulnerable to defendants’ persistent course of conduct.”

In sum, the city’s lawsuit, which was filed last week, says that ”defendants have harassed daily the occupants of said units” and that ”defendants’ wrongful acts and omissions continue to date.”

This legal action is like the ones the city brings against slumlords because – unfortunately – Mr. Trump in this instance is behaving like one.

He contends that he is the victim of wily, wealthy millionaire-tenants who are trying to extract exorbitant buyout money or other financial concessions from him. Yes, there are some well-to-do tenants in the building who have a very good deal living there at low, controlled rents. But most of the tenants are either average working people or elderly pensioners living on small fixed incomes, such as Social Security, who have lived there many years. Mr. Trump, the preponderance of the evidence suggests, tried to force these people out on the cheap. This is a man whose net worth was recently estimated at $400 million. He says he’ll fight the case all the way.

”Trump is not going to be harassed,” he told a Times reporter. Mr. Trump’s friends and supporters say he’s done a lot for the city with his developing and deal-making skills. There’s truth in this, for his Hyatt hotel and his Trump Tower have created jobs and economic activity. But does his contribution to the city’s economy excuse him from civilized behavior? Is he exempt from obeying the city’s laws? Though the press has not exempted Mr. Trump, it has generally treated him in a kindly fashion.

His behavior on Central Park South has received but sparse coverage. Though it would normally be defined as substantial news when the city sues one of the biggest developers in town, only one of the three daily newspapers carried the story.

Mr. Trump’s other activities and lavish life style get a lot of space in the press, local and national. A recent profile in The Washington Post quoted him as saying he was ready to take on new, world-sized tasks — referring to his heretofore unrevealed wish to become the nation’s negotiator on arms limitation with the Soviet Union. He says he’s a master negotiator, and could do a better job on arms talks than ”the kind of representatives that I have seen in the past.” Becoming an expert on nuclear weaponry would be easy, he said. ”It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles,” he explained. ”I think I know most of it anyway. You’re talking about just getting updated on a situation.”

Maybe Mr. Trump should take the afternoon off to study up on missiles and leave the tenants of 100 Central Park South alone.

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