Cinderella visits the Trump Tower Penthouse
September 1983: I received travel journalist press trip invitation from Montreal to New York (transportation not included) to meet Donald Trump and dine in his new triplex penthouse—-only to discover that it is still under construction, I will never get to see his gold-plated toilet!!! The Trump Tower has no 13th floor, but what's more telling about the hotel’s Asian clientele, is that it has no 14th floor either. "In Asia the number 14 is bad luck, because in Japanese it sounds like the word shuh - shuh , which sounds like the word for Death," explains my guide Sherri Liu.
Courtesy of Unsplash. Image by Sharon Yanai @sharonphoto
I don’t come to Manhattan in a pumpkin carriage, but I do arrive in tatters…to experience the “Xanadu of conspicuous consumption”
I'm dead asleep on the red-eye special from Montreal to New York. When I hear a Jamaican voice lilting "Here's Man-hat-tan!!!!" I bolt up in my seat. The other passengers have all disembarked. It's 5 a.m. --two hours before we are due to arrive. Pitch black out there. And this is not JFK or La Guardia Airport. It's the bus! Times Square, baby! The Port Authority Bus Terminal. And nothin's open. Nothin's open but security guard Derek Gross's eyes. They're like beaming sentinels and he's doing a running patter - a routine David Letterman would love --about the glories of the renovated Port Authority Bus Terminal, while using his portable metal railing like a shining lance to fend off the homeless and the drifters waiting to get inside.
I watch as a tall— like eight feet tall—guy in jeans with bellbottoms swimming around his ankles and various rings in his nose and lips asks Derek about lockers. "Lockers? Lockers?!!!! Ha!!!" Derek laughs. "Ain't no lockers in the Port Authority. Not since 1988, after the bombings. But we got perfume shops -- perfume shops! -- and Duane Reade Drugs, and French cafes. Oh Bon Pain --- that's bread. And Derek turns to me, "where're you from honey -- you're gorgeous!"
"Gorgeous? At 5 a.m.? Bleary-eyed and mealy-mouthed?
Here's to you, Manhattan. Manhattan before she sips her first coffee and puts on her makeup. Disheveled but loveable. NEW YORK - "Come visit - if you dare!" the Times Square Visitors &Convention Bureau seems to say. "Closed Saturday & Sunday. No guides. No maps."But there is a perpetual welcome committee gathered on the front steps - a crew of bums waving empty bottles.
A night bus to Manhattan with Montreal's Autobus Atlantours seemed like a handy way of getting a two extra days in New York at either end of a balmy September weekend. I have a date at One Central Park West on Columbus Circle. An invitation to stay at Donald Trump's International Hotel & Tower, and to dine in the private 52nd (really 54th) floor penthouse of this sensation-provoking billionaire. To see New York like I never saw it after 15 years of living here. But the invite, not actually from The Donald himself, doesn't include transport, and so I've done it on the cheap, a $50 round-trip bus ride in the dead of night.
After three years away from the Big Apple, I'm hungry to see its characters and pound its crazy, teeming streets. Gawk at its Wall St. wealth, survey the weird art in its Soho galleries along lower West Broadway, and hang out at Astor Place (between the East and West Villages), where some fanatic has covered all the streetlamps and sidewalks with glistening sea shells and pottery shards in a personal beautification scheme. But first, I will live as a princess in the Trump Tower…
Now I do my Cinderella act, transforming from a grubby budget traveller into a damsel worthy of a $1,300 a night suite. But everything's closed. Everything but the The Port Authority restrooms. Flush...flush...F-L-U-S-H!!! Tiny toilet cubicles with no hooks, because hooks invite thieves to reach over the door and grab your bag while you're sitting there. Every few seconds the high-tech idiot-savant toilet flushes again. I can't find the electronic eye, and some 25 flushes later—count 'em—I'm showered and ready for The Trump.
After checking my bags with Greyhound (you can do that if you show them a return ticket) I have five hours to kill until early check-in at The Trump. I stroll over to Times Square. It's gleaming! As bright as day. Ten-story neons make it dazzle like Tokyo's Ginza. I wander down to 34th Street, past Macy's monolith to my favorite strip of downscale-designer clothing shops where generations of Puerto Rican and then Philippino and now Asian women shop for cheap satin underwear, velvet tops and tights and other slinky stuff. With no mirrors and no changing rooms, you gotta really know your body. It's a zoo.
With the subway token left from my last visit to the Big Apple, I hop a bus up Eighth Avenue to the southern edge of Central Park at 59th Street. I meander over to The Trump, trying to look like I just stepped out of my limousine.
"Did you enjoy your flight, Madame?" asks the Concierge. "Oh yes, lovely," I reply, secretly savoring the irony. My Jamaican bus driver flew down Rte 87 South so he'd have more time to party in New Yawk! Heck, what do I care. I'm here with my Trump Attaché, being shown around my plush fifth floor marbled suite with nine foot floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Central Park…
"Here are your bathroom amenities, elegantly arranged inside a filigreed gold bag, Madame," says the Concierge, bowing slightly as he places it on the bathroom counter. "And this, Madame, is the button for your whirlpool bath," he continues, pointing to a sleek panel next to the marble tub. "It fills in less than a minute for your absolute convenience. Here is your china cupboard, fully stocked with the finest porcelain, and your ten-setting dishwasher. Madame, if you wish to enjoy the en-suite dining service, which is a three-hour minimum at $50 an hour, one of Jean-George Vongerichten's very own sous-chefs will prepare a custom meal right here in your suite," the Concierge offers.
"Here is your high-tech Entertainment Center, Madame," he points out with a gesture that sweeps from the state-of-the-art television to the latest in surround sound equipment, "perfect for a cinematic experience or inspiring music. And here is your pre-printed private stationery with matching envelopes, and your personalized business cards with your own private hotel number on each." I nod, trying to keep a straight face "We can even arrange a private cell phone should you desire," he adds. “Enjoy your stay, Madame," and hands me a key card adorned with the Trump logo. "Local calls and faxes are free."
Free ???! Local calls free? How many times have I been dying to call from a hotel bath or bed and been stopped by the dread of a $5 surcharge charge for each minute. I’ll call every local friend and colleague I know, describing Trump's view from The Top.
Touring the Trump
The Donald has thought of everything. In the health club of the Trump Tower, a monument to opulence and excess, each exercise machine has its own miniature cable TV. Luxury permeates every corner, as if the concept of exertion must be coddled and indulged. On the Virtual Reality bike, you pedal through virtual fields and valleys, immersing yourself in a digital terrain so vivid you forget the confinement of an indoor gym. But a bum turn, though, can send you leaping into a cartoon lake or smashing into a pixelated brick wall. Ouch! You forget your burning thighs. It's a workout designed for amusement as much as physical fitness. Here, where real sweat meets virtual landscapes, the real world feels remote and unnecessary.
On our travel journalist’ hotel tour, publicist Sherri Liu explains how a Fan Shui Master was hired to design the The Trump International Hotel and Tower's arrangement of furniture and space, to allow the Chi energy to flow harmoniously. Fan Shui means Wind and Water. This ancient traditional Chinese science of placement is the latest Manhattan fad, and as we'll see on our visit to Felissimo, a 1903 townhouse converted into an ethereal Japanese-style department store, Fan Shui candles and chimes are all the rage. The Trump Tower has no 13th floor, but what's more telling about the Trump Tower’s Asian clientele, is that is has no 14th floor either. "In Asia the number 14 is bad luck, because in Japanese it sounds like the word shuh - shuh , which sounds like the word for Death," explains Sherri Liu. So that is why, in a 56-story building, Trump’s triplex penthouse really occupies the 54, 55,and 56th stories, which are called the 54th, 55th and 56th stories. Got it?
“The Trump touch. It has set some people in New York to outright Trump worship; they call him ‘a real-estate genius’ who has helped lead the city out of the darkness of the mid-1970’s into a new era of glamour and excitement. Mr. Trump does not take exception to that.
To others, the notion that Mr. Trump seems to be able to do just about anything he sets his mind to is terrifying. They see him as a rogue billionaire, loose in the city like some sort of movie monster, unrestrained by the bounds of good taste or by city officials to whom he makes campaign contributions, ready to transform Midtown into another glass-and-glitz downtown Houston, with Central park for parking. ”
“They want to propose marriage to Mr. Trump or to put a tank of dolphins in the lobby or have him back a Hollywood film or do a television series about rich people living in Trump Tower or sell him some oil wells in Oklahoma or some land in Ankara or ask if he would be interested in a plan to bulldoze Ellis Island to build a nice golf course and clubhouse out there. ”
Returning to my room to change into sequins for the soiré tonight in Trump's private penthouse, I'm appalled to find the dishwasher going in full throttle. Appalled because I knew there could be ONLY ONE DISH in there, the small plate I'd used to cut a small slice of cheese. All alone in there, beaten senseless by tidal waves of soap and water. Could not the chambermaid have washed it by hand, or summoned it to the kitchen? With wasteless toilets flushing and dishless dishwashers washing, how much more of New York's water is senselessly going down the drain? I inquire about this. Am told that New York City's hotel hygiene laws require dishes to be washed by machines, to protect guests from bacteria. Okay.
Majestic empty rooms and rooms and rooms with 20-foot floor-to-ceiling windows... Our small group of journalists is wafted to the “52nd” (really the 54th) floor just before sunset, to experience Trump's Manhattan. Unfortunately, The Donald's penthouse is still under construction and he can't be here to greet us. But fortunately, because the penthouse is not yet decorated with expensive finishings, such as the solid gold toilet (with or without bidet?) we have been granted special access.
Wow! Wow! I've never seen Manhattan like this. The East River and the Hudson all at once, from 60th Street to Wall Street and the Statue of Liberty. Lights blinking on after the sun's last blush. It's too much. Too, too fabulous. Rhapsodic for an evening, but living with one of the greatest cities in the world inside you day and night...how does it feel? Ask The Donald.
After my sojourn at the Trump Tower, I walked downtown ten blocks to revisit my old neighborhood—the once street gang run Hell's Kitchen of West Side Story. After living for years on the Upper East Side as a staffer on new high-flying New York Magazine, in the spring of 1975 I changed lives and wardrobes and emigrated to Hell’s Kitchen to a flat on 47th Street between 9th and 10th Avenues to live with an Irish bagpiper who was teaching at the nascent hippie Irish Arts Center. Later I got a rent-controlled studio right on noisy Tenth Avenue and 52nd Street and lost my head to the Irish wire-strung harp and the music of Turlough O’Carolan."
The 1939 Works Progress Administration Guide to New York City described Hell's Kitchen as a district bearing one of the most lurid reputations in America". It encompassed freight yards, factories, garages,warehouses, slaughterhouses and tenements, and it was the haunt of hoodlums, gangsters and prostitutes. Now fancy developers like Trump have re-christened it “Clinton”. I knew it well.
You might say after my Cinderella stay at the Trump Tower, I turn back into a blue-jeaned bumpkin. On this balmy September evening I took a stroll over to 9th Avenue and just a few blocks down to 57th Street. Looking more up than down, my foot nearly caught in the cord of a color TV set rigged into the open innards of a towering streetlamp. Before me was a sidewalk colony - stretched out on fleabag mattresses, arms propped under pillows - engrossed in a National Audubon Society TV special.
I wanted to salute the electrical wizard who tapped the city's energy supply, and the others for making the best of a wretched situation. But I felt like an intruder barging into a living room with invisible walls.
New York's jobless have given new life to the city. They have turned Broadway into the world's longest flea market,street corners into bizarre bazaars, and the sinister subway into a musical feast. Broadway sidewalks between 60th and 79th Streets are lined with meticulously displayed articles for sale, the fruit of much scavenging - last month's Conde Nast Traveler, last year's diet and self-help books, last season's designer jeans - even computer keyboards. Hurrah for recycling!
This midtown immigrant neighborhood west of Times Square stretches from 34th to 59th Streets between 8th and 12th Aves. It was named after a dive near the Corlears Hook district on the East Side and a street gang organized in 1868, explains the 700-page guide, prepared by a writers' project in the Depression. Gentrification has peppered my old haunt with sidewalk cafes, off-off Broadway bistros, gourmet pie shops and expensive thrift shops. But the ribald rawness of the neighborhood immortalized in West Side Story remains. At midday on 9th Avenue a squat Latino woman is sinuously dancing on the sidewalk to Salsa blasting from her radio. She has a beer can with a straw stuck in it balanced on her head, and a smirk and a taunt for all who pass.
Sidewalk massages At 68th St. and Broadway, a drab older gent sits on a crate, selling $5 massages to relieve urban tension - five minutes for the neck, three minutes for shoulders, temples or subway whiplash. On the Broadway IRT subway platform, a young black man croons Johnny Mathis love songs in the dead quiet between screaming trains. No guitar, just a velvet voice echoing off the tiles. And at the IND subway entrance at West Fourth St. in Greenwich Village, a plump, grandmotherly black woman is selling - what? - clean jokes. Her sign says "Clean Humor For All Ages." Her life is piled beside her in a bundle, and a small stack of children's books is spread out at her feet.
Frederick Law Olmstead’s Dream Come True
Central Park - hallelujah! Muggers be damned! All you see is people having a good time. Rollerblading, speedwalking, jogging—even while pushing baby carriages!—playing volleyball on fake beach sand pits, sailing model boats on the lakes, picnicking around the Alice-in-Wonderland statue, riding the antique- Bavarian carousel horses or real ones on the bridal paths. As a guest of The Trump, you can have a trainer jog or rollerblade with you if you're lonesome, or wary of Central Park, or want a trainer's push. But there's so much training energy here already, you just jump into the colorful stream and are pulled along by it.
In 1850, this 840-acre territory between 59th and 110th Streets was "a barren rectangle of rocks and swampland occupied by squatters, goats and bone-boiling works. Visionary landscape artists Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux transformed it into a lush, vast public playground dotted with ponds, lakes and gardens, decorative benches and bridges, rustic shelters and nature sanctuaries.
A Central Park restoration project rebuilt Belvedere Castle, Bethesda Terrace and the 1869 Hudson River Gothic style Dairy and renewed the Conservatory Garden and Strawberry Fields. And a state-of-the-art zoo replace the former dreary, dilapidated animal jail. The Central Park Zoo's animals now live in simulated climactic zones - a rain forest, a temperate zone and a polar region—without cages or bars. The sea lion pool is the zoo centrepiece, but the most popular attraction is the cool, blue re-creation of an Antarctic ice pack, where flocks of gentoo and chinstrap penguins frolic and dive.
The Tropic Zone building evokes a misty jungle and houses white-bearded colobus monkeys, poison-arrow frogs, flying geckos, and piranhas and Yacare caimans, and a bat cave with Indian fruit bats. But what do I see scurrying across my path in front of WILDLIFE sign, like a pedestrian dashing to make a green light before being run over by a stream of honking cars? A hideously fat rat. Some things in New York City never change...