5 Trump Properties He Doesn't Like To Talk About
![5 Trump Properties He Doesn't Like To Talk About](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/article/9/7/8/678978.jpg?v=2)
Before he shot to international prominence as self-professed Best President and everyone-else-professed Worst Person, Donald Trump was mostly a property developer -- by his reckoning, of course, Best Property Developer. But as with everything else that comes out of his mouth, that claim comes with more more caveats, misleading footnotes, and damning untruths than your cable bill. Let's look back at a few of his more underrated shenanigans.
He Almost Built an Honest-To-God Castle In The Middle Of NYC
I don't mean to be hyperbolic, but it seems like Donald Trump might have an ego. As a possible example, consider the time he tried to build an actual fucking castle, like a deranged king of old, in the middle of Manhattan.
Christened "Trump Castle" (natch), the development would have comprised "six cylinders of varying heights with gold-leafed, coned and crenelated tops," built to a height of 60 stories, complete with a drawbridge and moat. In an interview, the chief architect for this project described Trump as "mad and wonderful," and while I can't vouch for the latter, he's far from the only one to vouch for the former. Despite initially teaming up with the Trump Organization, the owners of the site, Prudential Insurance, backed out of the project after they realized that the estimated $200 million cost would leave them with the most expensive square footage in the city. As one executive explained, "We didn't want to do a deal that depended on selling apartments for $1.5 million each to break even."
It's not all bad news, however. He eventually managed to make Trump Castle a reality ... in New Jersey. And it was truly a property fit for a king:
Related: 10 Stories About Donald Trump You Won't Believe Are True
Donald J. Trump State Park Is A Poisonous Hellhole
When you imagine Trump properties, you probably don't picture beautiful rolling vistas, glorious sunsets, and lush greenery -- just hideous gold-plated carbuncles with zero redeeming features, much like their owner. And then there's Donald J. Trump State Park, a 400-acre park outside of Westchester, New York, which has all of these beautiful features and much, much more!
Or it did once, before the garbage people moved in.
Back in the '90s, Trump bought the land in order to convert it into a golf course, but thanks to some pesky red tape that said rich assholes can't buy up acres of woodland for vanity projects designed to attract other rich assholes, the town where the park sits denied his request. That left Trump with a big tract of land that he couldn't do much with except his favorite thing in the world: get a tax break. He donated the land to the state of New York, netting a tax write-off estimated at $100 million.
As great as this worked for Trump, it was terrible for New York, which was left holding a big chunk of land it didn't want. They tried to make it look nice (they really did), but they could only afford $2,500 for annual upkeep, and having no full-time staff, the park soon turned into a nightmare zone of dilapidated buildings, moldy swimming pools, and other scenes that make it resemble a post-nuclear wasteland.