The East Wing of the White House is not President Donald Trump’s first demolition. He has been a source of criticism and outrage since the 1980s.
President Trump unveils a model of the White House’s two-story banquet hall
President Donald Trump has unveiled a model of the White House’s new two-story ballroom, saying he thinks it will be the largest in the world.
NEW YORK – President Donald Trump’s controversial move to build a $300 million White House ballroom isn’t the first time the billionaire builder has ruffled feathers with a wrecking ball.
The demolition of the east wing to make way for the 90,000-square-foot presidential ballroom has drawn ire from groups such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the American Institute of Architects, not to mention former first lady Hillary Clinton and members of Congress.
But Trump has a history of circumventing rules and breaking promises, dating back to his days as a second-generation New York real estate developer. Despite the White House’s status as a unique symbol of the United States, President Trump has decades of muscle memory of crushing past adversaries to build what he wants.
“He’s the type of developer who doesn’t ask for permission or permission,” said Richard Emery, a prominent lawyer and president of the Manhattan Cultural Preservation Society.
Amid dust and despair over the White House demonstration effort, President Trump wrote on October 20: “The East Wing is being completely modernized as part of this process and will be more beautiful than ever when completed!” President Trump’s aides have claimed that complaints about the new ballroom, which is nearly twice the size of the current White House, including the basement floor, are nothing but “manufactured outrage.”
“Giant Carbuncle”
Critics of President Trump’s efforts insist their anger is 100% natural. Peter Smyrniotopoulos, founding director of the Washington Architectural Foundation, told USA TODAY that the cavernous ballroom was “totally unnecessary.” “It is completely out of scale and would dwarf the original White House building.”
Sminiotopoulos referred to a 1980 speech by Britain’s Prince Charles about plans to expand the National Gallery in London, calling Trump’s ballroom a “giant tantrum on the face of an old, elegant friend.”
Heritage experts say Mr. Trump should have approved plans for the banquet hall through the National Capital Planning Commission and the Fine Arts Commission before clearing the ground for the east wing, which was first built in 1902. The east wing has traditionally been used as office space for the first lady.
Whatever the rules, history shows that Trump has “almost always gotten his way,” even in the face of cultural and regulatory opposition, said Hank Scheinkopf, a longtime political consultant for New York Democrats.
Freeze-out on Fifth Avenue
On July 31, President Trump assured Americans that his banquet hall was not a dent in the White House. “There will be no impact to the current building,” he said. “It’s close, but it doesn’t touch it, and it has complete respect for the existing building. I’m the biggest fan of that.”
Today, look at the flat area of ground where the East Wing of the White House once stood. This reversal will come as no surprise to patrons of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. They, too, have seen President Trump’s guarantees reduced to rubble.
In 1980, President Trump announced plans to buy the former site of the bankrupt luxury department store Bonwit Teller on Fifth Avenue and East 56th Street, next to Tiffany & Co., and build his 58-story flagship Trump Tower in the heart of the Big Apple.
But before clearing the site, the future president, then in his mid-30s, promised to save two Art Deco friezes depicting half-naked women that adorned the building’s upper facade and a 265-square-foot ornamental bronze grill installed at the entrance for donation to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But when the moment came, the irreplaceable frieze shattered and was jackhammered from the wall of President Trump’s home. Like many bricks and mortar, there is order.
The geometric brass grille was also gone. “It’s not something you can just put on your coat and carry around,” said artist Otto Teagan, who designed the piece 50 years ago. (Trump’s biographer later wrote that it was cut off with a blowtorch.)
Amid the uproar, President Trump said that an anonymous expert had determined that Freeze had no value (despite an appraisal appraising it at $200,000, or $832,000 in current values). It would cost $500,000 to save them (despite the campaign’s initial estimate of $32,000). And we thought preserving them could endanger pedestrians.
Trump told an interviewer that “the process of trying to redeem or trying to save something that has little or no artistic value…to me was not worth the safety of people’s lives.”
President Trump later paid nearly $1.4 million in a settlement over the use of 200 undocumented Polish workers in Bonwit Teller’s demolition, some of whom were paid as little as $4 an hour and others with harsh pay.
“We were working without masks. Nobody knew what asbestos was,” one worker later told the Times. “I was an immigrant. I worked hard.”
Commodore sinking
In the late 1970s, President Trump worked with the Hyatt hotel chain to renovate and reopen the shuttered Commodore Hotel next to Grand Central Terminal. This was his first major Manhattan deal, financed by a 40-year subsidy from New York state taxpayers.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Hyatt tore down the empty Commodore and turned it into a lively venue at one of New York’s signature intersections. But they covered the new hotel in black mirrored glass, making the site no longer in keeping with the architecture of the surrounding neighborhood.
Although architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable praised the new hotel’s atrium as “one of the most beautiful public spaces in New York,” others despised its appearance. Its exterior still shines like Darth Vader’s helmet on a classy midtown block.
A New York City architectural guide calls it “an unforgivably outrageous hotel nestled between two masterpieces: Grand Central Terminal and the Chrysler Building.”
The place is “a flashy hotel like the one you’d find in Atlanta or Houston, but definitely not New York,” critic Paul Goldberger wrote in the New York Times.
“Shadow” over the United Nations
In the late 1990s, opponents on Manhattan’s East Side successfully delayed construction of the 72-story Trump World Tower across from the United Nations, but a favorable court ruling and support from construction unions and then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani ensured construction.
Former CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite called the tower a “monster,” but neighborhood groups and many wealthy New Yorkers, including conservative megadonor David Koch, failed to stop it.
Even UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan feared the new tower would “cast a long shadow over everyone living in the area”. The tower opened in 2001.
Now, as president, Trump casts a different shadow on the United Nations.
Return to sender
When President Trump signed the deal to turn Washington, D.C.’s stately Old Post Office building into a hotel in 2013, he did a favor by adding famed historic preservation architect Arthur Cotton Moore to the team. Moore has worked to preserve historic buildings for more than 30 years.
“Arthur has a vision, a commitment and an understanding of this building that is second to none,” Ivanka Trump told Washington Magazine after helping the Trumps win their bid.
However, Moore left the project after work began, later stating, “They don’t give me much of a chandelier.”
Government documents then said Trump covered the landmark’s 100-year-old marble floors with carpet and hid its historic wood and marble walls, in violation of a contract with the General Services Administration.
The Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C. became home to MAGA’s loyal big-time lobbyists and visiting dignitaries, earning them tens of millions of dollars during President Trump’s first term. After Trump was voted out of office in 2020, he sold the hotel, which is now the Waldorf Astoria.
