When Donald Destroyed Historic Art to Build Trump Tower
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/07/trump-files-when-donald-destroyed-priceless-art-build-trump-tower/
To build his skyscraper, Trump first had to knock down the Bonwit Teller building, a luxurious limestone building erected in 1929. The face of the building featured two huge Art Deco friezes that the Metropolitan Museum of Art wanted to preserve. The museum asked Trump to save the sculptures and donate them, and the mogul agreed—as long as the cost of doing so wasn’t too high.
But then, according to journalist Harry Hurt III in his book Lost Tycoon, Trump discovered that taking out the sculptures would delay demolition by two weeks. He wasn’t willing to wait. “On his orders, the demolition workers cut up the grillwork with acetylene torches,” Hurt wrote. “Then they jackhammered the friezes, dislodged them with crowbars, and pushed the remains inside the building, where they fell to the floor and shattered in a million pieces.”
The art world was shocked. “Architectural sculpture of this quality is rare and would have made definite sense in our collections,” Ashton Hawkins, the vice president and secretary of the Met’s board of trustees, told the New York Times. Robert Miller, a gallery owner who had agreed to assess the friezes, told the paper that “the reliefs are as important as the sculptures on the Rockefeller building. They’ll never be made again.”
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Trump—posing as spokesman John Baron, one of the fake alter egos he used to speak to the press throughout his career—told the Times that he had the friezes appraised and found they were “without artistic merit” and weren’t worth the $32,000 he supposedly would have had to pay to remove them intact. “Can you imagine the museum accepting them if they were not of artistic merit?” Hawkins said in response.
= new reply since forum marked as read
He tweeted the link today in response to Trump being sad over destroying our "beautiful and historic" Confederate monuments.
for scale:
for detail:
...we got that :
I have seen beautiful old street clocks.
This one is just as horrible as the vulgar tacky tower.
He has never enough of that golden stuff??
His triplex has the most hideous decor I have ever seen. A nightmare 
Is it not possible to legally save antics from destruction ?
Here (Belgium), a building can be classified. It is possible to classify just a part or even a specific piece, decoration, whatever worth to be preserved.
It avoids brutal destructions.
It is a shame for the friezes. In french we say : donner des truffes à un cochon (feed pigs with truffles) 
They probably got the standard, "You can say you were working for ME! ME! ME!" line. 
Killed by greed and shamelessness.
