King Don

Al Smith, King Kong, Donald Trump, and the Empire State Building

#johnstrausbaugh #kingkong #donaldtrump #empirestatebuilding

Transcript

On St. Patrick's Day, 1930, construction began on the Empire State Building. Alfred E. Smith, the president of Empire State, Incorporated, arranged for work to start then as a nod to his Irish roots. Actually, Smith was only Irish on his mother's side. His father was an Italian-German immigrant, Alfred Ferraro, who adopted the neutral name Smith on coming to New York City before the Civil War, when anti-immigrant sentiments ran hot. But Al thought of himself as a full-on Irishman, and no one ever disagreed. When he ran for president in 1928, his national image as a beer-drinking, cigar-chewing Irish Catholic from Manhattan's lower east side doomed his candidacy from the start. He didn't even carry New York, the Empire State. Fronting for the new skyscraper was a consolation prize from friends.

When he opened the building on May 1, 1931, Al called it "the tallest thing in the world today produced by the hand of man." He pronounced world woild, showing his Bowery Boy roots. Like the nearby Chrysler Building, and 40 Wall Street downtown -- two other skyscrapers that had opened a year earlier -- the Empire State Building was a grand gesture of commercial confidence, even hubris, at the start of the Great Depression. It was also, literally, an empty gesture: there was only one tenant when Al opened it, it was still only 25% occupied in 1935, and it was still in the red when Al died in 1944. People called it the Empty State Building.

Yet if it was a bust as a real estate venture, it was still the tallest building in the woild, which made it a successful tourist attraction from the start. One particular visitor in 1933 sealed its status as a global icon. In his book Celluloid Skyline, the architect and author James Sanders observed that it's as if the Empire State Building and King Kong were destined to converge and make each other famous. Toppled from his mountaintop throne on Skull Island, brought in chains to another kind of mountainous island, Kong frees himself and instinctively seeks out the highest peak for his defiant stand. On one level it's another empty gesture, as he soon plummets to West 34th Street. Yet in the depths of the Depression – and to this day – it's not the fall but the exultation at the top, however brief, that leaves the biggest impression.

Six decades later, the building – as iconic as ever, but still earning very little – attracted a new cast of outsized characters, one of whom threatened to rename it the Trump Empire State Building Apartments. Like many of Trump's business ventures, it's a murky and unseemly story. In 1991 a shady Japanese real estate mogul quietly bought the building. When he was jailed for some bad business in Tokyo, an illegitimate daughter took over. Meeting Trump through his then wife Marla Maples, she made him a sweet offer: a 50% stake in the property, for virtually no investment, if he'd help make it more profitable. Since he'd just defaulted on roughly a billion dollars in debt, he leaped. 

In 1994, his publicist released a characteristically Trumpian overstatement, "Trump Buys Empire State Building." His plan was to evict the building's long-term leaseholders and convert for condos, apartments, and high-end commercial tenants. But the leaseholders were represented by the one other New York realtor with as much chutzpah as he had: Leona Helmsley. Trump deployed two of his favorite weapons, a lawsuit and a public smear campaign. He called Helmsley "a vicious, horrible woman" and "a disgrace to humanity." She fired back that she wouldn't believe a word he said if his tongue was notarized. A judge ruled against Trump in 1999, and the Helmsley group got rid of him by buying out his stake. 

In 1995, Trump did buy another vintage skyscraper, 40 Wall Street, which he rebranded the Trump Building. When it opened in April 1930 it was the tallest building in the world – until May, when the Chrysler Building topped it, followed by the Empire State Building in 1931. Nearby 70 Pine Street, opened in 1932, is also taller. When 40 Wall Street opened, the financial district was a ghost town, and like the Empire State Building, 40 Wall always struggled to be profitable. Under Trump's ownership it has housed a rogues' gallery of bottom-feeding "frauds, thieves, boiler rooms and penny-stock schemers," according to a 2016 Bloomberg report. 

In a radio interview on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, Trump, displaying the great humanity and sensitivity for which he has come to be known the world over, used the occasion of the World Trade Center's destruction to brag that he now owned the tallest building in downtown Manhattan. It was not true. 70 Pine Street was still, and always will be, taller.