Homes foundation of Trump empire
Donald Trump’s father built housing for the middle class.
NEW YORK — Few names are as evocative as that of the tycoon currently leading the Republican presidential field. Word: Trump. Associations: Trump Tower. “The Apprentice.” Luxury golf course, luxury hotel, luxury life. The hair. The White House?
In Hollis, Queens, approximately 15 miles east of Trump headquarters on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, where the biggest building called Trump is the nursing pavilion of a hospital, the associations get a scrambling. Trump: not Donald, but Fred. A Trump home: not a glass-and-gilt tower but a snug two-story.
The seedlings of the Trump real estate empire are here in Hollis, where Fred C. Trump built some of his earliest houses before going on to father the Trump Organization and the future presidential candidate. Along those quiet streets, shaded by tall oak trees and lined with tidy flower beds, modern-day Trump hallmarks — the glitziness, the swankiness — simply do not apply.
“Really? I feel like I won the lottery or something,” Hazel Thomas, 53, said upon learning last week that the elder Trump had built the compact beige stucco house with maroon trim she has owned since 2002.
On second thought, however, her enthusiasm faltered.
“I’m aware of some of his views,” said Thomas, a registered dietitian who emigrated from Trinidad nearly 40 years ago, referring to Donald J. Trump. She laughed. “Some of them are really far-out views.” Another laugh. “I’m a registered Democrat.”
Still, she felt compelled to add: “It’s a beautiful home. It’s really a strong house, it really is; I have to say that about it. He did a wonderful job.”
Over the course of seven decades of erecting houses and high-rises across Brooklyn and Queens, Fred Trump earned a reputation as a meticulous developer, the kind who punctually repainted the ironwork and, to save money, mixed his own disinfectant. Born to German immigrants, he built his first house in Woodhaven, Queens, within two years of graduating from high school, according to “The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire,” by Gwenda Blair.
The next two houses went up in Queens Village. But by 1926, three years after graduation, Trump had found a neighborhood to match his ambitions in Hollis, a middle-class community rising as fast as developers could put up new houses. Too young to sign checks, he partnered with his mother, Elizabeth, to form E. Trump & Son.
The classified advertisements of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, The Queens Leader-Observer and other local newspapers became showcases for his plans. “Why not visit!” one ad for an E. Trump & Son model home shouted, more command than suggestion. “Located in the very best section of Hollis only 5 minutes from the station, having every city convenience, including sewers, concrete street and sidewalks.” The price was listed at $9,950, though the company sold some homes around the same time for as little as $3,990.
William Socolow, of Brooklyn, was among those who bit, buying one of six Trump homes on 198th Street between 110th Avenue and 111th Avenue in July 1926 — the same house Thomas would buy nearly 80 years later. Like its five neighbors, it had three windows on the first floor facing the street, a dormer window above, an attic and four steps lead- ing to the front door.
Inside were a spacious living room, a dining room with parquet flooring and a kitchen with a breakfast nook. A small garage was in the back.
“It was a nice house to grow up in. Not a mansion, but a nice home,” said Adrienne Wollenberg, 89, Socolow’s second of three daughters. “It stood us well through the years.”
By the time Constance Robinson-Turner’s family bought the house next door in the 1960s, the neighborhood was beginning to fill with upwardly mobile black families like hers, the kinds of families who still dominate the area today. The names of local real estate barons — Stark, LeFrak, Trump — adorn several buildings there. But Robinson-Turner did not know about her home’s Trump connection until last week.
“From what I’ve heard, he was someone who was a people’s person, someone who was empowering and uplifting middle-class people,” said Robinson-T urner, a university health care administrator, of the elder Trump. And the younger? “I hope he’ll remember the legacy of his father,” she said in a tone that suggested he had failed to do so thus far.
When the real estate business crumbled during the Great Depression, Fred Trump took a brief but profitable detour into food, opening Queens’ first supermarket. Months later, he sold Trump Market to the King Kullen chain and returned to developing.
That building is still a grocery store, but the location of his first house in Woodhaven is unclear. At the time, no one was keeping track.
“He was well known around here, but it’s kind of like, who knew that was going to be important?” Ed Wendell, president of the Woodhaven Cultural and Historical Society, said. “It’s not really a monumental achievement, opening a supermarket — you know what I mean?”
By the time he died in 1999, Fred Trump had accomplished enough that the organization erected a plaque in his honor at the edge of the store’s parking lot.
“Began building at 15, built this store, founded E. Trump & Son now Trump Organization,” it reads. “Father of ‘The Donald.’ ”