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Foundation of an Empire: Modest Queens Homes, Built by Donald Trump’s Father
The seedlings of the Trump real estate empire are here in Hollis, Queens where Fred C. Trump built some of his earliest houses before going on to father the Trump Organization and the future presidential candidate. Along those quiet streets, shaded by tall oak trees and lined with tidy flower beds, modern-day Trump hallmarks — the glitziness, the swankiness — simply do not apply.
“Really? I feel like I won the lottery or something,” Hazel Thomas, 53, said upon learning last week that the elder Mr. Trump had built the compact beige stucco house with maroon trim she has owned since 2002.
“I’m aware of some of his views,” Ms. Thomas, a registered dietitian who emigrated from Trinidad nearly 40 years ago, said of Donald J. Trump. She laughed. “Some of them are really far-out views.” Another laugh. “I’m a registered Democrat.”
Still, she felt compelled to add: “It’s a beautiful home. It’s really a strong house, it really is, I have to say that about it. He did a wonderful job.”
Over the course of seven decades of erecting houses and high-rises across Brooklyn and Queens, Fred Trump earned a reputation as a meticulous developer, the kind who punctually repainted the ironwork and, to save money, mixed his own disinfectant. Born to German immigrants, he built his first house in Woodhaven, Queens, within two years of graduating from high school, according to “The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire,” by Gwenda Blair.
The next two houses went up in Queens Village. But by 1926, three years after graduation, Mr. Trump had found a neighborhood to match his ambitions in Hollis, a middle-class community rising as fast as developers could put up new houses. Too young to sign checks, he teamed up with his mother, Elizabeth, to form E. Trump & Son.
The classified advertisements of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, The Queens Leader-Observer and other local newspapers became showcases for his plans. “Why not visit!” one ad for an E. Trump & Son model home shouted, more command than suggestion.“Located in the very best section of Hollis only 5 minutes from the station, having every city convenience, including sewers, concrete street and sidewalks.” The price was listed at $9,950, though the company sold some homes around the same time for as little as $3,990.
William Socolow of Brooklyn was among those who bit, buying one of six Trump homes on 198th Street between 110th and 111th Avenues in July 1926 — the same house Ms. Thomas would buy nearly 80 years later. Like its five neighbors, it had three windows on the first floor facing the street, a dormer window above, an attic and four steps leading to the front door
Inside were a spacious living room, a dining room with parquet flooring and a kitchen with a breakfast nook. A small garage was in the back.
“It was a nice house to grow up in. Not a mansion, but a nice home,” said Adrienne Wollenberg, 89, Mr. Socolow’s second of three daughters. “It stood us well through the years.”
“From what I’ve heard, he was someone who was a people’s person, someone who was empowering and uplifting middle-class people,” Ms. Robinson-Turner, a university health care administrator, said of the elder Mr. Trump.
By the time Constance Robinson-Turner’s family bought the house next door in the 1960s, the neighborhood was beginning to fill with upwardly mobile black families like hers, the kinds of families who still dominate the area today. The names of local real estate barons — Stark, LeFrak, Trump — adorn several buildings there. But Ms. Robinson-Turner did not know about her home’s Trump connection until last week.
Ron Walker, 41, an electrician who lives in a two-story home clad in white siding several blocks from Ms. Robinson-Turner’s, was delighted to learn of his Trump connection. The closest he had come to a Trump affiliation before this, he said, was doing some electrical work at Trump Village, Fred Trump’s middle-income housing development in Coney Island, Brooklyn.
It was “just awesome,” he said of his link to his preferred presidential candidate, “a very smart man” who “knows business and knows how to run things.”
Mr. Walker said he was a registered Democrat, but would be willing to switch parties to vote for Mr. Trump. “You know the looks I get when I’m wearing this?” he said, flourishing a “Trump 2016” T-shirt.
When the real estate business crumbled during the Great Depression, Fred Trump took a brief but profitable detour into food, opening Queens’s first supermarket. Months later, he sold Trump Market to the King Kullen chain and returned to developing.
That building is still a grocery store, but the location of his first house in Woodhaven is unclear. At the time, no one was keeping track.
“He was well known around here, but it’s kind of like, who knew that was going to be important?” Ed Wendell, the president of the Woodhaven Cultural and Historical Society, said. “It’s not really a monumental achievement, opening a supermarket — you know what I mean?”
By the time he died in 1999, Fred Trump had accomplished enough that the organization erected a plaque in his honor at the edge of the store’s parking lot.
“Began building at 15, built this store, founded E. Trump & Son now Trump Organization,” it reads. “Father of ‘The Donald.’ ”
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/18/nyregion/foundation-of-an-empire-modest-queens-homes-built-by-donald-trumps-father.html