goodoil.news
Manhattan Wanted Manners, the Kids Wanted to Skate
Jeff Cunningham
Jeff Cunningham, the former publisher of _Forbes_ , is the author of _Lift: The Three Hidden Forces That Launch Remarkable Lives_ (Skyhorse Publishing).
Everybody says Nero fiddled while Rome burned. No one says the fiddle was invented 14 centuries later, and Tacitus, in the Annals, writes that the emperor was down the coast at Antium when the fire broke out in Rome during the summer of AD 64. He must have been holding a press conference.
Because that is what New York’s leaders did in 1986.
Imagine you are out for a stroll in the south end of Central Park in the spring of that year. Carriage horses clopping along the drive, pretzel carts steaming on 59th Street, softball on the Sheep Meadow, and in the middle of it all a padlocked fence around Wollman Rink with a sign: DANGER. NO SKATING.
The rink had been closed for repairs since 1980. The job was supposed to take two years. Six years and $13 million later, you’re looking at a cracked concrete slab, a construction trailer that hadn’t moved in six winters, and a puddle.
The richest city in America, a town that could chill oysters for a thousand dinners on any Tuesday night, could not do what a Frigidaire does every evening in Levittown.
Nobody at City Hall lit the match that set the city on an economic decline. The reputation had sunk so low that an American president had to say no to a bailout: “New York City, drop dead.”
Something as simple as fixing an ice-skating rink just didn’t get much attention at City Hall. They hired consultants to ‘assess’ the problem, and the assessment took two years. Then consultants to assess the assessment. It was why Henry J Stern, the parks commissioner, shrugged the most sardonic line right out of Tom Wolfe: “I think this is the classic case of Murphy’s Law.” The comptroller’s office spent 15 months on a report and concluded the problems were “incredibly complex.”
That is the sound of a fiddle, and it plays beautifully while fire spreads.
**THE VIEW FROM TRUMP TOWER**
From his triplex at the top of Trump Tower, Donald Trump could see right into Central Park. The Wollman Rink turned into a splash pad, and it ate at him the way an unpaid invoice eats at an accountant. He was 39, with the Grand Hyatt and Trump Tower already up.
“If it took me two-and-a-half years to put up a major skyscraper,” he said. “Surely it was possible to fix an ice-skating rink in a matter of months.”
He offered to take the job off the city’s hands for no fee. Stern said no. Two years later the city announced it was starting over, and Trump offered again. “‘No, thanks,’” Trump recalled Stern saying. “‘We can do it ourselves.’” Alan M Moss, who ran capital projects for parks, explained the city would need 18 months, on account of “procedural safeguards.”
Trump wrote to Mayor Ed Koch, calling the delays “unacceptable” and the overruns “incompetence.” Pouring a concrete slab, he wrote, “should take no more than four months.” Koch leaked the letters to the press, figuring the town would laugh at the brash kid from Queens.
The tabloids laughed at Koch instead.
“After the whole six-year multimillion-dollar debacle,” the _New York Post_ wrote, “you would think that they’d be jumping for joy. Not so.”
There is an old chess opening called the Queen’s Gambit, first recorded in a Göttingen manuscript around 1490, five centuries before Netflix graciously borrowed the name. In the opening move, White offers a pawn. If Black takes it, White moves two spaces to the center. If Black declines, White is in control. Trump was the pawn. Only in Trump’s case, it’s called the Queens Gambit because nobody raised on the Upper East Side of Manhattan would have thought to play it. Koch finally took his pawn.
“Trump thinks he can do it,” he told reporters. “What have we got to lose?”
The year before, Bronson Binger, the assistant commissioner who had overseen the mess, had promised a TV reporter the rink would be ready by Thanksgiving. And if not?
“I will resign,” Binger said.
Then Binger resigned.
**WHO MAKES ICE?**
“Since I knew absolutely nothing about building rinks,” Trump said, “I set out to find the best skating-rink builder I could. Logic suggested that the best place to look was Canada.”
He found the men who kept Maple Leaf Gardens frozen, flew them to New York and unrolled the city’s plans in his office. They winced. “Spaghetti on the floor,” one said, tracing the pipe layout with his finger. The city had gambled on an experimental Freon system to save $20,000 a year. It cost $13 million and six winters. The Canadians said junk the innovation and go back to brine, the same plain technology that froze hockey rinks across their country.
Then Trump did the thing Manhattan never forgave. He bragged.
Trump set the deadline in public and told every reporter in town when the ice would be ready. The swells heard ego. What they were hearing was a scoreboard. When the whole city knows the date, somebody has to be ashamed if you miss it. He went out to the site nearly every day to make sure nobody would be.
Wollman reopened in November 1986, two months ahead of schedule and $750,000 under budget. Dorothy Hamill and Scott Hamilton cut the ribbon. Attendance went from 130,000 in its last season before closing to 250,000 in its first full year back.
“I don’t really care about Trump’s ego,” said George Rinaldi, a skater in the crowd. “Anybody who can get anything done right and on time in New York is a bona fide hero.” Even Koch came around.
“Donald,” he said, “you performed a great public service.” Then: “I am now renting him out to other cities.”
The parks department, still holding meetings about caring, sent its press secretary, Adrian Benepe, out to insist “the project was largely complete by the time Trump entered the picture.”
**THE BLACK BOOK IN JAMAICA ESTATES**
You cannot understand any of this without Fred Trump.
Fred was the son of German immigrants. He started building as a teenager in a company that went out under his mother’s name, E Trump & Son, because he was too young to sign the checks. He kept his payroll in a black book in his inside pocket and drove a Cadillac, not a BMW.
“My father would pick up the sawdust and the nails,” Donald told a homebuilders’ convention. “He walked every job before the crews arrived. A supplier who shorted him got one warning. A contractor who missed a deadline didn’t get a second.” By the time Fred died in 1999 he had built housing for middle-class families across Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, and the society pages never noticed. He would have liked that.
Fred had one measure for his children: results. He told his sons to be killers, his word. Accepting the Horatio Alger Award, he put it plainly.
“Nine out of 10 people don’t like what they do. And in not liking what they do, they lose.”
It’s what I call Pothole Capitalism in my book, _Lift_. In Queens a truck driver graded a man on one thing, whether the hole was still in the road when he ran over it the next morning. He did not want to hear about budget cycles. He wanted the hole gone.
Manhattan ran on a different code. The Harmonie Club crowd wore Paul Stuart. The Queens crowd, the LeFraks and the DeMatteises, wore suits off the rack and didn’t get invited.
Which brings us to the hair.
Fred had his own version, a reddish wave combed back off the forehead. Donald inherited it, along with the tan and the volume and the bragging. A man with his money could have hired a barber from the Carlyle and a voice coach and passed. He never tried. I spent time with him at Mar-a-Lago, and when his name briefly fell off the Forbes 400 I introduced him to the editors. What struck me was that he had spent 20 years climbing from Queens to the Manhattan skyline and never once tried to hide who he was or where he came from. The hair was the Queens flag.
He kept flying it.
Most of us spend our careers learning which fork to use in rooms that were never going to let us in. Trump told the room to keep its forks. Then he fixed the thing that was broken in the room.
Trump wasn’t the first outsider to tread that ground. In 1857 the city put a 35-year-old journalist named Frederick Law Olmsted in charge of turning a swamp on 59th Street into a park that would belong, as he saw it, “entirely, unreservedly, and forever” to the people. He had no landscape credentials. He and Calvert Vaux built it anyway, blasting rock with more gunpowder than would be fired at Gettysburg. In December 1858 the skating pond opened, and rich and poor crowded onto the same ice. _Harper’s Weekly_ called it “the equalizer of the metropolis.”
A century later the same ice was melting.
**THE BROKEN WINDOW**
In 1982 the criminologists James Q Wilson and George Kelling argued in the _Atlantic_ that one unrepaired window tells the neighborhood nobody is minding the store. Wollman was a broken window in the middle of the most famous park on earth. Seven years after Trump fixed it, Rudy Giuliani won City Hall, and his police commissioner, Bill Bratton, ran the city on the Wilson-Kelling theory. Murders fell from 2,245 in 1990 to 649 in 2001. Tourism surged. The 2000 census counted more than eight million New Yorkers for the first time. The city that couldn’t freeze water had become a model of urban competence. New York City had many saviors.
But Trump fixed the first broken window. In public, on deadline, so the world could see how to get results.
**THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE**
Trace the southern edge of Central Park. Old Money’s temples at 61st and Fifth, the two marble clubs facing off on 60th, the Plaza at 59th, that wedding cake where Fitzgerald set his parties and Capote held court. Those few dozen blocks form a glittering triangle that is some of the most valuable real estate on New York’s Monopoly board.
Trump Tower changed the arithmetic of Fifth Avenue. Across his New York projects, three thousand union workers drew paychecks during construction. Then came Wollman, which turned a developer into a civic figure. Then Trump Parc, hundreds of condominiums on the tax rolls. Then the Plaza. Then Trump International at Columbus Circle. Tower, Wollman, Parc, Plaza, International: each one looked like an overreach, and each one paid off.
“He made New York real estate visible,” said Mitchell Moss, the NYU urban planning professor. Developers who had never met Trump started thinking the way he thought. Lenders who had been antsy about New York started returning calls. The Queens Gambit had worked. But getting credit for a job well done was another thing.
Olmsted got remembered. Trump got erased. That’s an old story.
Even Nero got a raw deal on the fire: Tacitus says he raced back from Antium when he learned about it, opened his gardens to the homeless and cut the price of grain. The senators he had humiliated wrote the history, and the fiddle became the myth. The Central Park Conservancy website tells the history of skating in the park and has a photo of skaters on Wollman in 1986.
It doesn’t say who made the ice.
**THE FIXER**
There is no Trump Doctrine in the sense a think tank describes. That is in part why he gets so misunderstood. There is a rule book from Jamaica Estates, about three and a half pages long.
#1 Fix the broken thing.
#2 Find the man who knows how, even if he’s from Canada.
#3 Set the date in public so somebody has to be ashamed if you miss it.
#4 And never apologize for who you are, as long as you’re fixing something.
That is why he is the most heroic antihero in American public life, a man who does the hero’s job without the manners.
Manhattan wanted manners. The kids wanted ice.
Every statehouse and federal agency has its Wollman. So does every company and every community. The fiddlers will always have their explanations about how much they care. The question for anyone who runs for office is whether the pothole is still there the next morning.
Trump lost a few pawns after Wollman. Atlantic City. The bankruptcies. The headlines. The Gambit is a dangerous opening because sometimes it looks like delusion.
But so is not being able to make ice.
_Lift_ is available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1510786732.**** This essay is adapted from the chapter “Queens Gambit.”
This article was originally published by RealClearBooks and made available via RealClearWire.
