Trump Tower rose in the ashes of impeccable taste

No one who remembers the 1980 Bonwit Teller fiasco in New York City is surprised by today’s East Wing. demolition.  Donald Trump’s total disregard for the preservation of history while reneging on promises made is exactly the same.

 It is worth looking back at that story today.

From the Vault: The Travesty Of Trump Tower and Bonwit Teller

Long before I hated Donald Trump, I despised Trump Tower, that tacky glass monstrosity on Fifth Avenue that replaced the elegant and stylish department store Bonwit Teller. If Bonwit’s signified impeccable style and taste, Trump Tower was everything garish and tacky.

Like the real estate developer himself.

The venerable Bonwit Teller closed its store at Fifth and 56th in 1979. That was good news for an ambitious 33-year-old Donald Trump, who acquired the old Bonwit’s building and began demolition in 1980, razing the 1929 art deco limestone structure to construct his namesake tower.

At the very top of the façade were limestone relief panels that were not only Bonwit Teller’s signature but works of art.

A Day In June 1980

Manhattan Goddess Dancing in the Winds 1929- Bonwit Teller Building Artist Rene Paul Chambellan ( 1893-1955)

As an art student in New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I often visited the multiple galleries that clustered around 57th Street, nestled between the tony shops and high-end department stores.

Returning to this rarefied area of real estate as a casually dressed 25-year-old art student, where only a few years earlier I had worked at Bergdorf Goodman dressed in a Diane Von Furstenberg wrap dress, amused me.

One sunny Thursday in early June 1980, I found myself on the 11th floor of a building on 57th and Fifth Avenue in the Robert Miller Gallery. Art galleries were often located in large office buildings, and an elevator ride brought you to each floor filled with multiple galleries exhibiting an eclectic mix of contemporary and historical work.

I don’t remember the art being shown that day, but I have an indelible memory of what I saw through the gallery’s big windows.

The iconic reliefs on the Bonwit Teller Building. In 1980, Trump demolished Bonwit Teller, including architectural elements he had first pledged to the Met

Directly across stood Bonwit Teller, the elegant façade of which featured a spectacular 15-foot high Art Deco sculptural stone ensemble, at eye level with the gallery.  The two-stone bas relief sculpture depicting stylized, partly draped female nudes brandishing scarves were embedded on a façade between the eighth and ninth floors.

That day activity and street noise across the avenue were unusually loud, distracting me from the paintings.

When I looked outside, I  realized that a cluster of workmen was on a scaffold in the process of destroying the Art Deco limestone bas relief with masonry saws and jackhammers.

This piece of art and history, being drilled to bits, was destroyed right in front of my eyes.

Suddenly, all the gallery goers in the room noticed too, going over to the large windows in disbelief, as we watched the demolition in absolute helpless horror. The sculptures fell to the ground and were cracked into smithereens.

Then someone in the room muttered loud enough for all to hear: “That fucking bastard.”

No one had to ask who he was referring to.

It was Donald Trump.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

When the young, brash developer acquired the site, he announced with glee his plans to demolish the elegant 1929 structure and erect a $100 million glass tower with a mix of commercial and residential space.

There had been public concern.

After the demolition of the historic building was first announced, the Metropolitan Museum of Art stepped in, recognizing the cultural value of its ornamentation.

The Museum convinced Trump to remove portions of the historic facade and donate them to the institution for its twentieth-century sculpture department. The Met estimated its value at $200,000. Trump agreed to preserve the artwork and donate it to the Museum – on the condition that the cost to him would not be too high.

The public felt reassured.

Now that confidence would turn to disgust.

Appalled as an artist at the loss of art so irreplaceable, my heart broke too at the sentimentality of the loss.

Bonwit Teller

Bonwit Teller’s iconic shopping bag

The irreplaceable memories of a building so iconic were ones I had viewed hundreds of times throughout my life. In those walls, memories lay. Losing it was like losing a piece of my past, too.

My mind recalled the heady mix of perfume wafting as you entered the store, the genteel, hushed voices of the clerks, and the tone of the elevators and their operators as they stopped at each floor.

Bonwit Teller

From the tender age of 4, shopping excursions to Bonwit Teller with my grandmother Sadie- always with her artfully arranged Hermes scarves- were a special treat, elevating even the most mundane purchase to the level of experience and entertainment.

It was the store where Nana Sadie always bought her glamorous Memorial Day and  July Fourth evening dresses for the lavish summer parties at her beach Club, The El Patio, her winter cruise wear, or a smart dress in Miss Bonwits for a special charity luncheon. I would marvel at the ease with which she would whip out her violet-covered charge plate and walk out with wondrous clothes without any cash being exchanged.

There was a rite of passage that was generational. As a young working woman, how many lunch hours had I spent shopping across the street at Bonwit Teller’s, always returning to my office at Bergdorf Goodman’s, somewhat sheepishly toting a competitor’s easily identifiable shopping bag with its iconic spray of violets and green leaves on the stem tied in twine.

Demolition Devastation Makes The News

New York Times, June 6, 1980

The following day, the demolition devastation was headline news in New York.

Like most New Yorkers reading the June 6th N.Y. Times, I skipped over the front page story about Ted Kennedy staying in the presidential race to challenge President Carter, and went straight to the headline: “Developers Scraps Bonwit’s Sculptures.”

Bonwit Teller with its Art Deco bas-reliefs was unceremoniously demolished to make room for Trump Tower

In typical Trumpian fashion, Donald was now backpedaling on his offer to save the art, after realizing that it would take two more weeks and $32,000–chump change considering the tower cost $300, million to construct–to properly take the reliefs off the building.

According to the N.Y. Times article, a “Trump spokesperson” named “John Baron” declared that an independent appraisal deemed that the panels had little value and were “without artistic merit”  and not enough to justify the cost of removal or the 10-day delay.

New Yorkers were livid. As a museum spokesperson said in the article:

“Can you imagine the museum accepting them if they were not of artistic merit?” Hawkins said. “Architectural sculpture of this quality is rare and would have made definite sense in our collections. Their monetary value was not what we were interested in. The department of 20th-century art was interested in having them because of their artistic merit.”

In addition to the sculpture debacle, Trump’s workmen also destroyed the 15-by-25-foot bronze latticework grillwork over the building’s front entrance, chopping up the metalwork with torches. Trump had also promised these to the Met.

“We don’t know what happened to it,” Baron (aka Trump) told the Times of the decorative grillwork.

It wasn’t long before Trump was referring dismissively to “the junk I destroyed at Bonwit Teller” and boasting that he’d ordered the destruction himself.  In true Trump fashion, in a later interview, he contradicted himself, or rather John Baron, when Trump claimed removal of the sculpture would cost $500,00 and months of delay.

The entire episode sparked a public outcry condemned by many, including The NY Times, which declared, “Evidently, New York needs to make salvation of this kind of landmark mandatory and stop expecting that its developers will be good citizens and good sports.”

Trump, the ultimate poor sport, has never felt any sense of civic duty.

Is it any surprise today that art and history eluded Trump? For this philistine, profit has always been more dear to him than a greater cultural good.

Trump told us who he was as a businessman and public figure- ready to renege on an agreement if it becomes inconvenient, no regard for the knowledge of experts and a blatant disregard for the truth.

Trump didn’t buy the historic building when the department store went bankrupt to preserve a historical monument.  He wanted to create a monument to himself.

Trump Tower.

When I pass Trump Tower now, I can no longer evoke the rich perfumed air of Bonwits, but only the odious stench of Donald Trump that permeates everything he touches.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2025. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream