Donald Trump's Horrible Buildings

To The Gate of Heaven 

Part One: Donald Trump’s Horrible Buildings

I

From here to The Gate of Heaven

Is a distance of just over twenty-nine miles.

The journey takes forty-one minutes in a car—

Thirty-seven, if there’s no traffic on the road.

But there’s always traffic on the road, unless you go

At dead of night. And no one makes that journey

At dead of night.

                               Go west down Fifty-Seventh Street

And make a right on to the West Side Highway,

Which, from 54th to 72nd Street,

Is never called The Joe DiMaggio Highway

Except on maps, and the dedicated mile

Is not so much a tribute to the Yankee Clipper

As a monument to Rudolph Giuliani’s vanity:

Nobody but Giuliani wanted Yankee Stadium

To be rebuilt on the Upper West Side;

And only Giuliani wanted it renamed

“Rudolph Giuliani Stadium”.

                                                       

There should be no delays from Fifty-Ninth

To Seventy-Second Street—there are no entrances

Or exits—but if by some mischance there are,

Don’t look to your right. If you’re held in traffic,

Look left across the river at New Jersey.

Practice saying “Hoboken”. Locate it

On the Hudson Waterfront. Frank Sinatra

Was born and raised in Hoboken—so sing;

Sing and wait and don’t look right. That way

You might not have to gaze upon Trump Place.

Between Fifty-Ninth and Seventy-Second Street

The fourteen ugliest buildings in New York

Stare out over the Hudson towards Hoboken

And Hoboken glares back with Sinatra’s baleful glare

That says “You’re all dead men” and means it too.

These buildings comprise Trump Place, South Riverside,

A zone of hell designed to indicate

Where Donald Trump stands on the Upper West Side.

Most of them are twelve years old or less,

And the most recent, 50 Riverside Boulevard,

Was finished—or stopped being built—three years ago.

Its defiant gaze of incompletion,

The pride it takes in lacking something vital,

Exemplifies the Trump aesthetic in action,

In fact this building is the Trump aesthetic

In its perfected form.

II

50 Riverside Boulevard provokes unease.

The word that best describes it is uncanny.

Trump’s work can be relied on to provoke

A negative response: anger, outrage,

Dislike, displeasure, mockery, contempt—

But this is something else. There’s rigour here.

The shoddiness of the materials

Displays a calculated recklessness.

The grimly ostentatious lack of care

With which defective elements are assembled

Adds conviction to the overall impression

Of abandonment, rather than completion.

Trump’s robust commitment to neglect

Asserts its baleful influence most clearly

In his trademark disdain for routine maintenance.

A deepening patina of filth emphasizes

The featureless flat plane of the façade

With its glum scatter of things that need to be

Repaired, replaced, removed, improved or done.

The dirt and the thriving rash of trouble-spots

Bring a strong suggestion of disease

To the building’s prurient air of stern rebuke,

But do nothing to conceal its dreadful nakedness

Or to undermine its mad belief

That it was built to drive men mad with lust.

Compelled by duty and perverse desire

To be exposed at all times to men’s eyes,

It lives to satisfy the need to see,

The urge to show.

                                 50 Riverside Boulevard

Is without shame; it is the absence of shame

Made manifest in the shoddiest materials

Available to man.

                                                The rash will spread

And tear into the fabric of the building.

All the neglected jobs, all the repairs

Not done, will disappear. The nakedness,

The ecstasy of shoddy workmanship

That cast a spell on all who witnessed it,

Will at last be covered and consumed

By a seething carapace of decay.

Donald Trump is sixty-nine years old.

Buildings that fall down are nothing new

And each one’s always shoddier than the last.

He’s always called them his babies—his early efforts

Often hit the ground with a cheerful thud,

But they’d get right up and keep on trying

And he’d encourage them. He’s always said

He’s more a father than a builder.

                            Rotten concrete,

Bricks like burnt toast, mortar with all the virtue

Of cream cheese, an unerring faith in money

Saved and an urge to carry on regardless

Of danger and to improvise solutions

On the hoof—these are things you’d find

On every building site that’s ever borne his name.

But 50 Riverside takes it, like he says,

To a whole new level.

                                      Trump the builder

Is proud of his ability to busk

Corrections to a building as it drifts

From true and starts to crack and stoop and stares

Down at the earth. On the fortieth floor

At 50 Riverside he raised the side that sagged

With a hastily constructed splint, built

Not to last from dunnage never meant

To bear weight, and boshed in the cracks

With a flimsy clunch made out of unwashed sand

From South Beach, Staten Island, mixed

With polyunsaturated garbage, decompressed

And held together with the gooey toxic waste

That’s produced in vast, illegal quantities

When deep-form industrial sumpage is conducted

On a massive scale.

                                   But don’t be fooled.

This opulence of unsound practices,

The joy derived from using useless stuff,

Trump’s preference for what is bound to fail—

None of this is down to laziness

Or ignorance or inattention to detail.

Confusion on this enormous scale

Requires a rare contempt for human life,

A loathing for the world and everything

It’s ever been, is now and will ever be,

A denial of all value, a cultivated absence

From one’s own life—or from the place

In time that it was meant to occupy—

And the energy to put it all into action.

Everything that Trump has ever made

Betrays its maker’s morbid fear of being outlived

By his own creations. His ambition’s nothing more

Than a need to be forever rich, famous and alive.

For him no world can be imagined

In which he’s not rich, famous and alive.

He thinks that when he dies the world will end

Obediently, like a TV set when he turns it off.

He likes to think that when this TV set

Goes dark, his death will erase everything

Ever broadcast, the memory of everything

Ever broadcast, the history of broadcasting,

The invention of TV, all published works,

All thought, all human life. He wants his death

To make the universe incapable

Of sustaining life—no, he wants more:  a universe

That couldn’t possibly have ever witnessed

Life in any form, even from a distance:

Barren from the start—a sleepless dream

Of perfect vacancy, fulfilled and unconfined.

He’ll die content, knowing that when he dies

The sky will be swept clear of every star,

All solar systems, galaxies and planets

And things he’s much too ignorant to name,

And—his peace of mind in death depends on this—

Of anything that threatens to go on spinning,

Shining, orbiting or remaining fixed

After his death.

                             Trump’s real ambition

Is to leave a black hole behind him. The irony

Makes him smile—legacy is for losers.

But how could his magnificent oblivion

Deny itself the uncannily familiar pleasure

Of not quite knowing his dream has been fulfilled—

That the last thing in the universe will be

A black hole to which someone he will never know

Has attached his name?

                                            You can stare for hours

At the windows at the front and not know

What urges you to panic, vomit, flee,

As from some vile anomaly in nature.

Something’s terribly wrong—that’s all you know

And all you need to know. If someone could explain

Why the windows look like rows of empty sockets

From which the eyes have been removed, the horror

Would remain. This is the Trump aesthetic

In its perfected form.

III

Last year I bet my wife a ruby ring

Against a pair of anaconda boots

That sometime in the next thirteen years

The City would issue an administrative ordinance

And raze Trump Place to the ground—and if I don’t pass

Through the Gate of Heaven before I get the chance,

I’m pretty sure I’ll get my fancy boots

Long before twenty-twenty-nine—and now

That Donald Trump’s decided to devote

His twilight years to becoming, as it were,

The Outcast of the Universe, I may well

Have them in time for Christmas.

                                                          And I’m sure

Trump Place won’t be the only casualty.

I’d like to see an angry mob burn down

Trump Tower. I’d like to see the world unite

In condemning the abomination that is

The Trump World Tower on United Nations Plaza.

And I would be quite happy to blow up

The Trump International Hotel and Tower

On Columbus Circle.

                                                      But, with luck—and since

No entrances or exits interrupt

The flow of traffic—it should be possible

To go from Fifty-Ninth to Seventy-Second Street

With no delays.

                              At Seventy-Second Street

No one seems to notice the discreet

(And discreetly undisputed) change of name:

The Henry Hudson Parkway seizes the baton

And carries it the length of Riverside Park—

Four slender miles of decorative lawns

And many discreet cynosures all the way

Through Harlem and—but I’ll stop there.

       Some advice:

Beware mudslides if you decide to pick up speed

In the shelter of Morningside Heights to steal a march

On death. Be of good heart, for there is solace.

There is a blessing in the falling mist

That settles on the honest penitent;

That issues from the true ekklesia,

The church within a church that also waits

Within the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine,

High above the Henry Hudson Parkway:

It is the living hope of all the world.