Coney Island is a neighborhood in Brooklyn. There are 60,000 people who live here. And
it was known for all these immigrant cultures mixing.
Fred Trump, the father of Donald Trump, was involved in so many scandals in Coney Island.
What happened in the 1950s was, there was an area of Coney Island on Ocean Parkway,
which was referred to as ‘the Gut.’ It was a real mixed neighborhood.
Fred Trump thought that this site would be better if he had it.
He used his political connections to gain these sites.
When it was declared an urban renewal area, all these people had to be relocated.
All of this took place between 1960 and 1962.
He then gained federal housing funds and then overcharged the tenants and overestimated
all of his costs. So he was accused of windfalls of millions of dollars.
African American members of that community were not offered apartments in Trump Village.
The white members of that community were.
So you had 900 African American families, almost entirely, who had to be relocated.
And this became another one of Fred Trump’s scams. What he did was to collect a relocation
fee from the city. He made a profit on each family that was relocated, and he took these
families and put them into the summer bungalows of the west end of Coney Island.
The owners would say, ‘Well, we don’t have heat. They’re not winterized.’ He
said, ‘Ah, you’ll put in space heaters.’
They had bad wiring. They couldn’t handle the space heaters. A lot of these bungalows
burned. There were many deaths. Children died in these bungalow fires over the years.
I witnessed this, and I documented it. Starting when I was 11 or 12 years-old, I began photographing
the neighborhood.
Here you can see one of the bungalow colonies, and here is a fire in the bungalows. These
fires were a constant part of my childhood here.
They were almost all African American families. It’s well documented that Trump was racist
in his apartment rentals.
We sued the Trump Organization and Fred Trump and Donald Trump. We found how Trump personnel
would be told to deal with people of color, and one of the ways in which they were told
to deal was to put a big ‘C’ on their application.
He was constantly in the headlines for one scandal or another. He built housing at Beach
Haven that was supposed to be for veterans. Trump was investigated by the federal government,
who called him a ‘real estate profiteer’ who bilked the public out of $4 million. He
was accused of polluting Coney Island Creek. He paid a fine for that.
Many people know that he was the person who demolished Steeplechase Park.
Steeplechase was the anchor of Coney Island. As long as Steeplechase was there, Coney Island
would survive.
Steeplechase opened in 1897. It was the most beautiful amusement park. This was something
that had quite an influence on my childhood. It was an indoor amusement park. It had a
beautiful stained-glass facade. It had classical architecture. There were fluted columns. There
was statuary, rose gardens. The rides were all classical rides.
You pays your money, and you takes your choice. You can be spun, banged, turned upside-down,
or half-killed.
There was an attraction called The Insanitorium. When you got off the Steeplechase horse, you
were chased by a clown with a paddle. It was not like your typical amusement park, it was
more about leaving your everyday life and being inside this magical place.
Fred Trump stepped in and bought the property. What Trump wanted to put on the Steeplechase
site was, as he described it, Miami Beach housing, luxury housing with waterfront views.
The Steeplechase Pavilion and 14 acres surrounding it was zoned as C7, which is amusement zoning.
That’s the only use it has.
He tried to get the zoning changed, and the city denied it, so he figured if he demolished
the pavillion and razed the site, that the city would be forced
to give him his zoning change.
In September 1966, he sent out engraved invitations to witness the beginning of the demolition
of the park. He posed in front of a bulldozer. He had, as the headline said, ‘six bikinied
beauties’ posing in the shovel of this bulldozer.
They threw bricks through the stained-glass, knocking out the teeth in the smile of the
Steeplechase face. It was very similar to a lot of the things that his son Donald does,
as far as having women as props and just being vicious in their business.
This is the demolition of the pavillion. You can see the stained-glass and the horses painted
on the front. This is where the Steeplechase face was. And I witnessed this. This was one
of the saddest experiences of my life. I thought until the last minute that somehow this building
would survive and would be a landmark.
It really led to the downfall of Coney Island for all the small business people. With Steeplechase
as the anchor, all these private businesses profited. With the death of Steeplechase,
you had a place that was just devastated for years and years. But being Fred Trump, he
sold it to the city after the Steeplechase Pavilion was demolished, and he made a million
dollar profit on the deal.
All these scandals are documented, and they all led up to, I believe, the that way Donald Trump
does business.
After speaking with Donald, they said,
A flat store is a crooked attraction. It’s one of the attractions that you can’t win in
Coney Island. A lot of the concession owners remember meeting him and how they thought
he had a future as a conman.
Coney Island survived because there were a lot of people who were heavily invested here
emotionally. The city kind of gave up on it. The police kind of gave up. The sanitation
department gave up. There was a feeling of abandonment. It wasn’t the best time to
have a business here, and a lot of people stuck it out, and they’re the ones who saved it
It’s taken a long time to get out from under the shadow of Fred Trump.