The Lost City of Trump

#TIA – You have to say this about Donald Trump: no one ever accused him of thinking small.

“The week before Thanksgiving in 1985, a 39-year-old Donald Trump announced his plan to make sure nobody would ever forget him.

At a showy news conference at his sleek, glass-wrapped Grand Hyatt in midtown Manhattan, and later that evening at a cramped, tense community meeting in the cafeteria of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice on the Upper West Side, Trump unveiled drawings and models of his vision for the old Penn Central rail yards on the bank of the Hudson River. It wasn’t just the largest undeveloped tract of land in Manhattan; it was “the greatest piece of land in urban America,” he crowed. And on those 76 acres, he intended to build nearly 8,000 apartments and condominiums for up to 20,000 people, almost 10,000 parking spots, some 3.6 million square feet of television and movie studio space, and some 2 million square feet of “prestigious” stores. There would be no fewer than six 76-story towers, and looming atop it all one unprecedented skyscraper twice that height. It was a behemoth endeavor meant to go, his promotional materials proclaimed, “beyond the grandeur and excellence that has become synonymous with projects bearing the Trump name.””

Read more at Politico