Something else about the criminal destruction of the East Wing

[Tanuki]

6. Consistent with his wanton destruction of the Bonwit Teller Building,

including smashing artistically significant Art Deco friezes, when he was clearing the space to build Trump Tower.


https://placesjournal.org/article/post-trump/

"In
1980 I was a working for an architectural firm in Midtown Manhattan. I enjoyed going out at lunchtime to visit art galleries, which in those days were clustered around 57th Street; and which is how, on a sunny day in June, I found myself on the eleventh floor of a building on Fifth Avenue, in the Robert Miller Gallery. I don’t recall the art being shown that day, but I do have an indelible memory of what I saw from the gallery’s big windows. Directly across stood the department store Bonwit Teller, the elegant facade of which featured a spectacular 15-foot-high Art Deco sculptural ensemble, at eye level with the gallery. That day activity across the avenue was unusual, and it took me a moment to realize that workmen on a scaffold were in the process of destroying the limestone bas-reliefs with masonry saws and jackhammers. Other gallerygoers took notice, and we all watched the demolition in horror — and then somebody muttered “that fucking bastard!”

“That fucking bastard” was — who else? — Donald Trump. Known back then as the brash and ambitious scion of a real estate family from Queens, Trump had not yet fully impressed himself onto the consciousness of New York City, but he was well on his way — and the controversy surrounding the destroyed sculptures definitely put his name in the news. The young Trump had acquired the site at 56th and Fifth in 1979, after Bonwit Teller relocated to a smaller site a block north, and he announced big plans to demolish the 1929 structure and erect a $100‑million tower with a mix of commercial and residential space. The old Bonwit’s, designed by Warren and Wetmore, the architects of Grand Central Terminal, was not a designated landmark, but the sculpture had become a beloved local icon. With demolition imminent, public concerns were allayed when the developer agreed to preserve the artwork and donate it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which estimated its value at $200,000. Hence the shock when, on June 6, 1980, the front page of the New York Times ran this headline: “Developer Scraps Bonwit Sculptures.” A Trump Organization spokesman told the Times reporter that independent art appraisers (never identified) had declared that the decorative panels were of little value, and certainly not enough to justify the estimated $32,000 cost of their removal or the ten-day delay to the project. 3 When reminded in a later interview of the Met’s appraisal, Trump claimed that removal of the sculpture would actually have cost $500,000 and caused months of delay. Soon Trump was referring dismissively to “the junk I destroyed at Bonwit Teller” and boasting that he’d ordered the destruction himself. "....(more)

[Note: In other accounts I have read, the Trump "spokesman" who belittled the value of the sculptures was revealed to have been none other than "John Barron."]