The young Trump had acquired the site at 56th and Fifth in 1979, after Bonwit Teller relocated to a smaller site a block north, and he announced big plans to demolish the 1929 structure and erect a $100‑million tower with a mix of commercial and residential space. The old Bonwit’s, designed by Warren and Wetmore, the architects of Grand Central Terminal, was not a designated landmark, but the sculpture had become a beloved local icon. With demolition imminent, public concerns were allayed when the developer agreed to preserve the artwork and donate it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which estimated its value at $200,000.
independent art appraisers (never identified) had declared that the decorative panels were of little value, and certainly not enough to justify the estimated $32,000 cost of their removal or the ten-day delay to the project. 3 When reminded in a later interview of the Met’s appraisal, Trump claimed that removal of the sculpture would actually have cost $500,000 and caused months of delay. Soon Trump was referring dismissively to “the junk I destroyed at Bonwit Teller” and boasting that he’d ordered the destruction himself. 4
When journalists inquired of the Trump Organization about the existence of the two limestone Art Deco friezes, a spokesperson going by the name John Barron replied: three independent experts had found that the works had “no artistic value” and were worth at most an estimated $9,000. According to “Barron,” the removal would have cost $32,000 and would have meant a week and a half delay of the demolition work. The alleged costs for the delay were later calculated by Trump’s side to be $500,000. The next day “Barron” was quoted as saying that the bronze latticework that had hung over the entrance to the Bonwit Teller building was also missing: “We don’t know what happened to it.” The artist Otto J. Teegan, who had designed the piece in 1930, responded, “It’s not a thing you could slip in your coat and walk away with.” “It’s odd that a person like Trump, who is spending $80 million or $100 million on this building, should squirm that it might cost as much as $32,000 to take down those panels.”
On the fourth day, the real estate developer contacted the journalists and explained that he had ordered the destruction of the Bonwit Teller reliefs himself: “Because their removal could have cost more than $500,000 in taxes, demolition delays and other expenses, and might have endangered passing pedestrians on Fifth Avenue. ‘My biggest concern was the safety of people on the street below,’
Trump’s biographer Harry Hurt III confirmed, Trump himself ensured that the workers were told to remove the bronze latticework over the entrance with blowtorches, separate the friezes from the walls with jackhammers and break them off with crowbars, and throw them down into the interior of the building where they shattered into a million pieces.
The alleged press spokesperson John Barron, who sometimes called himself Baron and occasionally identified himself as vice president of the Trump Organization, was none other than Trump himself. In a legal proceeding in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan concerning the illegal employment of Polish workers in the building of Trump Tower for $4 an hour Trump admitted that he and one of his executives have used the name John Barron in some their business dealings.