The current president has committed many outrages in his long career. Too many for most of us to recall them all. And that’s just the ones that are publicly known. One particular outrage that many of us forgot during his presidential campaigns was his destruction of New York’s landmark Bonwit Teller building to make way for the first Trump Tower. The tale of this demolition encapsulates many of trump’s signature gangster-wannabe moves:
There was public outrage when valuable Art Deco bas-relief sculptures on its facade, which had been promised to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Trump, were destroyed on the orders of the Trump Organization during the demolition process. In addition, the demolition of the Bonwit Teller store was criticized for a contractor's use of some 200 illegal Polish immigrant workers, who, during the rushed demolition process, were reportedly paid 4–5 dollars per hour for work in 12-hour shifts. [Wikipedia: Business career of Donald Trump]
Stiebel had received notice of the sculptures' pending demolition, but by the time she reached the Trump Tower site, the workmen told her they had been ordered to "destroy it all." Trump later acknowledged he had personally ordered the destruction of the sculptures and grille. Trump said these "so-called Art Deco sculptures, which were garbage by the way," had been informally appraised by three different individuals as "not valuable," and they had pegged the sculptures' value at $4,000 to $5,000. He also told the media that carefully removing the sculptures would have cost him an extra $500,000 and would have delayed his project. In a New York Magazine article in November 1980, Trump said the decor of his Grand Hyatt New York included "real art, not like the junk I destroyed at Bonwit Teller." [...]
Miller lamented that such things would "never be made again," and Peter M. Warner, a researcher who worked across the street, called the destruction "regrettable." However, Trump later said he used the notoriety of that act to advertise more residential units in the tower. [Wikipedia: Trump Tower]
We should have kept all this in mind. This is his modus operandi: act first — break the law, the statue, the norm, whatever it takes to get his way; duck responsibility later.
In some ways trump and his people remind me of what Fitzgerald wrote: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” But unlike Tom and Daisy in The Great Gatsby, trump doesn’t smash things up by accident, and he doesn’t expect other people clean up his mess. Quite the contrary. His destruction is deliberate, and he means it to be permanent.
We’ve all watched this pattern play out this year with his wanton demolition of the East Wing of the White House, which represented everything trump hated: built under Truman, the East Wing was turned under Jackie Kennedy into the First Lady’s office wing. The women’s wing. Targeted for demolition by the trumpists, along with all signs of women’s accomplishments in history.
Philip Guston, “Reconstruction and the Well-Being of the Family” (1942; source: GSA)
Which brings us to the current threat. Timothy Noah at The New Republic has been documenting the trump regime’s plot against federal real estate holdings. With the goal of making the DOGE vandalism permanent, they want not just to eliminate entire programs and offices but to sell off the buildings themselves – in my view, so that the programs can never come back.
As Noah details in a new article, “Can the ‘Sistine Chapel of the New Deal’ Be Saved From Trump?,” first up on the chopping block is the former Social Security Administration Building, known since 1988 as the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building. The building had housed Voice of America (VOA) and the US Agency for Global Media from the 1950s up until trump’s gutting of those agencies this year.
Ben Shahn, East Wall detail (source: GSA)
Aside from the architectural importance of the building itself, it houses a number of important artworks from the 1940s. These include murals by Ben Shahn, Philip Guston, and Seymour Fogel, as well as friezes by Henry Kreis and Emma Lu Davis.
Most of these works could be saved. The most extensive murals, though — those by Ben Shahn — were created directly on load-bearing walls and would probably be impossible to remove intact.
Based on trump’s past behavior, though, from his midnight demolition of the Bonwit Teller friezes in 1980 to his stealth destruction of the East Wing this year, we can expect him to try to sneak a wrecking crew in and destroy the building before any art can be saved. Like his German counterparts, he regards the works of the New Deal artists as “degenerate art,” fit only for the junk heap.
There is a petition to save these works and the building:
Save the Wilbur J. Cohen Building — the “Sistine Chapel of the New Deal”
Please add your name. I hope we can save the art and the building, and send trump to the junk heap of history where he belongs.
Gallery of endangered art
These are some of the works that will be destroyed forever, possibly within the next few months, if trump gets his way.
Henry Kreis, "The Benefits of Social Security" (1940), frieze over the East entrance to the Cohen Federal Building (from Wikimedia)
Emma Lou Davis, “Unemployment Compensation” (1940), frieze over the West entrance to the Cohen Federal Building (from Wikimedia)
Ben Shahn, East wall detail. Shahn used the panels on the East wall of the Social Security Building to show the social problems that predated Social Security. In this detail, he depicts unemployment. “Against a background of a typical stark, unlovely company house, I have placed in close proximity waiting men and discarded machines.” (livingnewdeal.org/...)
Another East wall detail: childhood poverty and illness.
On the West wall, Shahn depicted the country back at work — and at play — under the protection of Social Security.
Another West wall detail: men at work.
West wall detail: healthy young people at play.
