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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.

‘Why Pay Less?’ Is the Trump Chump Philosophy

By Jane on 08/30/2017 in Donald Trump

By Sydney H. Schanberg

First published in Newsday, May 24, 1988

Every time I think I’ve got Donald Trump figured out, he confounds me. Take the full-page ad he bought in yesterday’s New York Times. The whole back page of the first news section, which the Times sells for $39,000 and change. So Donald Trump took Ivana’s weekly clothing allowance to buy an ad just to tell us that the apartments in his Trump Tower cost more than anybody else’s in New York City. The ad doesn’t say the apartments are the most luxurious in all Gotham or the best constructed or even that they have the most spectacular views. They just cost more money, it says.

In some cities, that might put people off as just the slightest bit tacky. Not in New York. To pay more for something here is to go to the top of the nouveau heap instantly. Picture the oneupmanship at a table in Mortimer’s: “Did I tell you, my dears, we just bought an apartment. In Trump Tower. You won’t believe this, but it was $1,273 a square foot. The highest per-square-foot price in the entire city. You can see why we simply had to have it.”

The quote may be fictional, but the square-foot championship price was a central part of Donald’s ad. So was his claim, taken from a survey done by a luxury condo broker, that “the top price paid for an apartment in New York City in 1987 was in Trump Tower.” Then it said: “Amazingly, of the 10 most expensive apartments, four were in Trump Tower.” And that was about it, except for a final sentence which said that “The Trump name, locations and buildings have proven, once again, to be the standard by which all others are judged.”

He presumably means the gold standard or, since that’s old hat, maybe the Croesus or cupidity standard.

Donald has changed. Time was when he would have died before he would have defined Trump Tower by its price tag.

Remember his original brochure for the 68-story pyramid? “Imagine a tall bronze tower of glass,” it said. “Imagine life within such a tower. Elegant. Sophisticated. Strictly beau mode…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-to-ceiling — New York at dusk. The sky is pink and gray. Thousands of tiny lights are snaking their way through Central Park. Bridges have become jeweled necklaces. Your diamond in the sky. It seems a fantasy. And you are home.”

That was back in 1982. Donald was still a poet then. Something has corroded and jaded him. Maybe it’s the cynicism that seizes a man’s soul when his victories come too easily and, as time passes, he finds fewer and fewer challenges worthy of him. Maybe it’s his disappointment with h is early role model, Mayor Edward Koch. Maybe it’s his dream of the White House, a dream deferred as he looks at his party’s nominee, George Bush, and wonders where the nation’s spine went. Not to mention its poetry.

Whatever the tangled roots of his malaise, he’s not the Donald we used to know. The old Donald wouldn’t have bothered to take out this ad. He would have just sneered at those who would quibble with his superlatives, and then he would have wandered onto the moors and written more poems.

You see, the reason Donald bought the ad was that he allowed himself to get upset by an article in 7 Days, a bright new weekly magazine about life in Manhattan. The article, by Samantha Roberts, said that some golden people who had bought apartments in Trump Tower and later became disillusioned were having trouble now selling their “diamond in the sky.” A number of them have taken losses in order to unload the flats.

The 7 Days article was an update of a more comprehensive New York Newsday piece by Sylvia Moreno that ran a year ago. That piece described how “Paul den Haene, the former owner of Poland Spring Co., took a $251,000 bath on the resale…of three condos in the tower for which he had paid $2.6 million.” Den Haene described the materials and the craftsmanship in the apartments as “cheapo, el cheapo.”

Why should Donald care about what sore-loser Philistines think? Why doesn’t he consult the muses anymore instead of getting down and dirty into demeaning mud fights? Like the lawsuits he’s always filing against the city and state to get better tax breaks — even though he hardly knows what to do with the money when he wins.

Even on Trump Tower, where he made perhaps $100 million in clear profit, he couldn’t turn the other cheek when the city sought to deny him the special tax gifts because it was a luxury building instead of a place within reach of ordinary mortals. He sued the city and won his tax gift — a swell $40 to $50 million.

And now he’s taking out ads telling us his Trump Tower apartments are selling for world record prices. They’d be even more expensive if he hadn’t got the tax subsidy from the public treasury.

You know, I don’t want to be petty, but I figured it out, and $6.39 of that tax break was my money. A lot of my friends paid, too.

Donald, next time you take out an ad, make it poetic — poetic justice. Let it be an announcement, to all of us who have contributed to your support payments, that the check is in the mail.

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