Walking to Experience New York City
Trump takes a bite out of the Big Apple

Donald Trump

At One Central Park West on Columbus Circle, you'll see the Trump International Hotel. Later, you'll visit the Trump Tower.

Ostentatious is definitely not a dirty word to Donald Trump. Take a look inside the Trump International Hotel, which is featured on the Apprentice television show.

Some make fun of "The Donald" or even resent him, but, in fairness, Trump has helped keep a great city from withering away into a lifeless rotting museum piece.

Amsterdam may age gracefully with almost no new construction, but, as recently as the late 70's, New York was not ageing gracefully at all.

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Until Trump showed faith in the city by starting new projects in the 1970s, New York had lost much of its job creating and tax producing commercial and industrial base due to

• changes in the economics of manufacturing that favoured factories too large to locate in New York City,
• the move to container shipping that also required large plots of land not available in New York City,
• utterly high taxes,
• impotent crime control,
• simply terrible schools (with exceptions),
• labour unrest,
• racial unrest,
• Mafia interference,
• and much more.

Mobil Oil, J. C. Penney, and other major corporate headquarters fled to other cities. Moreover, New York nearly lost the New York Stock Exchange to New Jersey.

Trump helped start a renaissance in New York City that continues to this day.

Preservation movement

On the other hand, resistance to people like Trump represents a healthy change in New York attitudes.

Although Trump's projects may be life enhancing, for too long New York City residents allowed an evil combination of greedy real estate developers and so-called urban planners (with the help of massive amounts Federal funds) to build incredibly ill-conceived urban renewal and highway projects that destroyed entire working class neighbourhoods and commercial areas.

You see the legacy of this wrongdoing everywhere in the city in the ugly and repetitious high rise housing projects that have become havens for violent crime and in the multilane highways that are simply not needed in place of better rapid transit.

Ill-planned housing, for example, keeps parents from seeing their children playing outdoors while parents are inside. These housing "projects" also lack the mixture of commercial and residential usage that did so much to keep areas lively throughout the day and evening, which did so much to help prevent crime.

Continue your New York City walk with Lincoln Center and Upper East Side.

Go to >> Walking New York City
Go to >> Times Square
Go to >> Carnegie Hall and Columbus Circle
Go to >> Donald Trump
Go to >> Lincoln Center and Upper East Side
Go to >> Art Museums (Whitney, Guggenheim, Metropolitan)
Go to >> Fifth Avenue, Grand Army Plaza, and Plaza Hotel
Go to >> Miracle Mile and Rockefeller Center
Go to >> Public Library and Empire State Building
Go to >> Union Square and Greenwich Village
Go to >> Ground Zero and Wall Street
Go to >> Battery Park, Ellis Island, NYC Harbour
Go to >> Chinatown and Little Italy

In addition to your NYC walk, be sure to see:
Go to >> NYC tips
Go to >> Staying safe
Go to >> NYC day trips