New York
Decades Ago, Columbia Refused to Pay Trump $400 Million. Note That Number.
Donald Trump was demanding $400 million from Columbia University.
When he did not get his way, he stormed out of a meeting with university trustees and later publicly castigated the university president as “a dummy” and “a total moron.”
That drama dates back 25 years.
Today, these two New York City institutions — the ostentatious billionaire president of the United States and the 270-year-old Ivy League university that has cultivated 87 Nobel laureates — are locked in an extraordinary clash. The future of higher education and academic freedom dangle in the balance.
But the first battle between Mr. Trump and Columbia involved the most New York of New York prizes — a lucrative real estate deal, according to interviews with 17 real estate investors and former university administrators and insiders, as well as contemporaneous news articles.
Some former university officials are quietly wondering whether the ultimately unsuccessful property transaction sowed the seeds of Mr. Trump’s current focus on Columbia. His administration has demanded that the university turn over vast control of its policies and even curricular decisions in its effort to quell antisemitism on campus. It has also canceled federal grants and contracts at Columbia — valued at $400 million.
The Trump Organization and the White House declined to comment.
Lee C. Bollinger, the former president of Columbia who eventually opted not to pursue the property owned by Mr. Trump and foreign investors, chose instead to expand the Columbia campus on land adjacent to the university. “I wanted for Columbia a much more ambitious project than the Trump property would permit, and one that would fit with the surrounding properties, that would blend in with the Morningside campus and the Harlem community,” he said in an interview.
The clash had its roots in the late 1990s, when Columbia was facing a common challenge in New York: Situated in one of the most expensive and congested cities in the world, it wanted more space. The federal government was supercharging the budget of the National Institutes of Health, and to compete with other universities for research grants, Columbia needed room to house more scientists and labs.
Expanding its footprint beyond its Morningside Heights campus into neighboring Harlem would be complicated. In 1968, the university began construction on a gymnasium in Morningside Park. The design, construction delays and limited access to Harlem residents resulted in “cries of segregation and racism,” according to a Columbia University Libraries exhibit. Tension between the university and community leaders in Harlem persisted for decades.
Columbia officials and trustees hoped to mend the relationship, but they knew they also needed to look for alternatives.
Enter Mr. Trump. Not yet a reality television star, he was then a brash real estate developer, with a love of tabloid press attention. He offered a home for a Columbia expansion, an undeveloped property on the Upper West Side between Lincoln Center and the Hudson River. It was known as Riverside South before he rebranded it Trump Place.
The property was at the southern tip of a much larger 77-acre site Mr. Trump had owned since the early 1970s, a former freight yard that was once the largest undeveloped parcel in Manhattan. In the early 1990s, Mr. Trump had made no progress in developing the site after amassing more than $800 million in debt, most at very high interest rates, and couldn’t afford bank payments on the property.
But in 1994, two Hong Kong investors came to his rescue. They agreed to finance his vision of high-rise residences, with Mr. Trump remaining the public face of the project. He would also seek $350 million in federal subsidies.
Yet Mr. Trump was struggling to decide what to develop on the southern edge. He pursued buyers, including CBS. He boasted that the network was close to a deal for a 1.5 million-square-foot studio on the property.
But CBS eventually balked, deciding in early 1999 to stay put in its studios on West 57th Street.
A few months later, Mr. Trump was hyping the property every chance he could. “My father taught me everything I know, and he would understand what I’m about to say,” Mr. Trump said at the wake of his father, Fred Trump. Then Mr. Trump touted his plans for Trump Place. “It’s a wonderful project,” he said.
By 2000, Mr. Trump had set his sights on a new partner: Columbia, which he had heard was looking for space. A development there would have been a departure for the university. It was more than two miles from Columbia’s campus and relatively small, requiring it to be built up, with towering buildings.
Still, the idea captured the attention of several trustees and some top administrators. For more than a year, they discussed what could become of the land, mostly with officials at the Trump Organization and sometimes with Mr. Trump himself. Mr. Trump even coined a name for the potential development: “Columbia Prime.”
But in negotiations, he frequently changed his demands, even as reports would appear in Mr. Trump’s favored tabloid, The New York Post, claiming that Columbia was close to buying it.
In private, he tossed around numerous prices, topping out at $400 million, according to a Columbia official from that era, a figure that an anonymous source leaked to The Post a few times.
No matter the amount, Mr. Trump said to Columbia officials, the university would be getting such a great deal that it should also rename its business school the Donald J. Trump School of Business.
An administrator rebuffed Mr. Trump’s request. The university does rename buildings, the person told him, noting that its engineering school had been recently named for a businessman who had donated $26 million. If Mr. Trump wished to make such a gift, the person said, there were other officials at Columbia who would be eager to meet. Mr. Trump did not make a donation.
As the discussions dragged on, many people from Columbia grew frustrated with their dealings with Mr. Trump. Still, the two sides set up a meeting in a Midtown Manhattan conference room with the intention of moving a transaction forward.
A few trustees and administrators arrived with a report prepared on their behalf by a real estate team at Goldman Sachs, which attended every meeting between Columbia officials and representatives of the Trump Organization. It outlined what the investment bank considered a fair value for the land.
Mr. Trump showed up late, was informed of the university’s property analysis and became incensed.
Goldman Sachs had assigned a value in the range of $65 million to $90 million, according to a person who was in the room. In an attempt to soothe Mr. Trump, a trustee offered that the university would be willing to pay the top of the range.
It didn’t matter. A furious Mr. Trump walked out less than five minutes after the meeting had started.
The university did not formally abandon a possible expansion on Mr. Trump’s property until after Mr. Bollinger took over as president in 2002. At that time, Columbia had been considering two options: an expansion onto the Upper West Side plot or a move north into West Harlem, where Columbia had started to buy properties.
In his inaugural address, Mr. Bollinger spoke about the university’s need to expand, calling the school a “great urban university” that is the “most constrained for space.”
“This state of affairs, however, cannot last,” he added. “To fulfill our responsibilities and aspirations, Columbia must expand significantly over the next decade. Whether we expand on the property we already own on Morningside Heights, Manhattanville, or Washington Heights, or whether we pursue a design of multiple campuses in the city, or beyond, is one of the most important questions we will face in the years ahead.”
He evaluated the Trump option for a satellite campus and also began to have conversations about mending the fissure with Harlem’s community leaders, and expanding westward, creating a contiguous footprint.
He quickly determined that Harlem, not Donald Trump, was Columbia’s future. “This is an opportunity in Manhattanville to create something of immense vitality and beauty,” Mr. Bollinger told The Times in 2003. “This is not to just go in and throw up some buildings.”
Mr. Trump’s West Side property was eventually developed after the Hong Kong billionaires who owned a majority stake in it sold the entire site for $1.76 billion.
Yet Mr. Trump was outraged. He accused the investors of selling it for far less than what he could have. He sued them for $1 billion in damages. The case was dismissed, with the judge pointing out that the development had sold for $188 million more than its latest appraisal.
If he was underwhelmed by the success of the Riverside South, Mr. Trump had another asset that was appreciating: his own fame.
“The Apprentice” made its television debut in January 2004, and became an instant hit.
But Mr. Trump’s mega-stardom did not make him forget about the failed deal with Columbia.
In 2010 — about eight years after Mr. Bollinger contacted Mr. Trump to tell him the school would be expanding into Harlem — two Columbia student journalists who had written a profile of the university president received in the mail a gold-embossed letter on thick paperstock from a displeased reader, Donald J. Trump.
He included a copy of a missive he had recently sent to Columbia’s board of trustees, in which he called the Manhattanville campus “lousy” and Mr. Bollinger “a dummy.”
“Columbia Prime was a great idea thought of by a great man, which ultimately fizzled due to poor leadership at Columbia,” Mr. Trump wrote.
He signed it with a black marker and scribbled, “Bollinger is terrible!”
Mr. Trump also shared his indignation in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “Years after the deal fell through,” the newspaper said, “Trump is still irate. ‘They could have had a beautiful campus, right behind Lincoln Center,’” Mr. Trump told the reporter and called Mr. Bollinger a “total moron.”
Mr. Trump was perhaps staying true to principles outlined in “How To Get Rich,” an advice book he co-wrote a few years after his deal with Columbia went sour.
One chapter is titled “Sometimes You Have to Hold a Grudge.”
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.
How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.
We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?
Ryan Compton knows a thing or two about gigs. To make it in New York, he has worked as a retail associate inside the Museum of Modern Art’s gift store, a cashier for a downtown taqueria and a paint mixer for Takashi Murakami. He has experienced the paradox of a city both known for its artists and for pricing artists out.
Financial constraints forced Mr. Compton, who is from South Jersey, to move away from New York twice over the course of two decades. He has lived in Baltimore, Chicago and Philadelphia, but remains convinced the resources and people inside New York are unparalleled.
“You never know who you’re going to run into,” he said. “Everyone’s curious about each other.”
Since moving back in 2022, he has whittled down his source of income to a single gig as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he made $51,000 before taxes last year. It’s his second time at the museum. He first worked there part-time in 2011 before leaving in 2015 to earn his master’s degree in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
“I know I couldn’t afford graduate school and the cost of living in New York at the same time,” he said.
A third try at New York life has forced Mr. Compton, now 46, to confront the sustainability behind a career as both an interdisciplinary artist and a security guard — even inside one of the most famous museums in the world.
Love at First Sight (With New York)
As an undergraduate student at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Mr. Compton looked forward to spending weekends at his friend’s apartment gallery in the East Village in Manhattan.
A combination of showing face and knowing the right person led to his side project at the time — fashioning 3-d printed stuffed animals with skull faces — which were featured in an issue of Vogue Japan. He even sold a few inside a handmade craft store in Tokyo’s Ginza district for about $1,000.
“I was interested in the contrast between fuzzy-shaped animals and skulls,” he said, later adding, “You know, stuff when you’re a 20-something-year-old being kind of edgy.”
The early moment of success propelled Mr. Compton to chase after opportunities to showcase his work. While supporting himself financially through retail and service jobs, he helped write the artist Roman Ondak’s interactive performance piece at MoMA, “Measuring the Universe;” and worked as a collaborator for “No Souls for Sale,” an experimental project temporarily at Dia Chelsea and later, the Tate Modern in London. Both went unpaid.
“The chance to work in modern art before I was 30 is unheard of,” Mr. Compton said. “It only happens in New York.”
A Slower Pace
Tens of thousands of people flock to the Metropolitan on weekends, and it’s Mr. Compton’s job — one he has found increasingly difficult — to make sure the art is untouched. He believes social media has altered the way visitors engage with the museum. Think more selfies and poses leaned against Hellenistic marble.
The one hour work commute from Parkchester in the East Bronx gives him time to prepare for a long day ahead. He splits a two-bedroom with a co-worker for $1,000 a month and pays $50 in utilities. Heat and water are included in his rent, and his roommate covers the cost of Wi-Fi. He pays $90 each month for his phone bill.
The slower pace of the residential neighborhood matches the stage of life he’s in now. In the last few years, Mr. Compton has slowed down as he has come to terms with the expenses behind his art.
He no longer has free access to fabrication laboratories pegged to his university, and he has opted for the more cost-friendly hobbies of zine-making and book binding. He is, however, eyeing a $1,000 3-d printer. For now, he has settled on $20 a month Photoshop subscription.
The largest constraint tempering Mr. Compton’s spending is his $100,000 student loan debt from graduate school. The window for his deferment period closed, and even with some money he inherited after his mother passed, he says he needs a miracle to finish paying off his loans. “I’m not sure what to do anymore,” he said.
Splurging on Plants and Experimental Harsh Noise Records
Mr. Compton may not have any children, but he is a proud “plant dad.”
His apartment houses $1,000 worth of plants sourced through Facebook groups, pop-ups and by following Brooklyn Horticulture online. He typically pays $30-$50 for medium to large sized plants, but he is constantly on the lookout for deals.
When he isn’t at home with his plants, Mr. Compton treks into Manhattan to do his weekly grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s. He prefers the prices there to local spots in the Bronx and estimates he spends $70 each week.
A cash guzzler of Mr. Compton’s food budget is the $20 a day — an additional $80 a week — he spends at the Metropolitan’s staff cafeteria for breakfast and lunch. When working 12 hour shifts, “I’m not gonna go home and make something to bring the next day,” he said.
On his days off, he seeks out affordable food deals. He frequents Vanessa’s Dumplings in Chinatown for their $8 dumpling special.
When in the mood to treat himself, Mr. Compton rides the train a few more stops out to Ridgewood, Queens and Bushwick, Brooklyn, to visit his favorite record stores like Fringe Records and Nexus Records. An experimental harsh noise aficionado, he spends no less than $100 each visit.
His biggest and most recent splurge was a 10-day trip to Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka in Japan in February. He was able to cut his $900 round trip ticket to $700 with credit card points. Add in the cost of hotels, meals and souvenirs, he spent close to $5,000 total.
“I wanted to go because my artwork had been to Japan, but I haven’t been to Japan,” he said.
Looking Ahead
Mr. Compton wants to strike a balance between saving and enjoying the life he dreamed of in New York. To help pay off his loans, he considered applying to be an art handler for the Metropolitan, a job with a slight pay bump. But without his present benefit of overtime pay, he’s afraid he would be making less than he does currently.
Over the years, Mr. Compton has found community among other security guards at the Metropolitan, who, like him, are artists. He has also built inroads with notable names at the museum, one being Sheena Wagstaff, the former chairman of modern and contemporary art, who he said took the time to know Mr. Compton not only as a co-worker, but also as an individual, too.
Because of his connections, he feels like he has nowhere else to go. He considered a quieter lifestyle upstate in Westchester or the Catskills, but believes he will make less money outside of the city. And, of course, he would have to leave the place he’s called home for the majority of his adult years.
“I did four other cities, and they weren’t as good or great as I like New York,” he said. “I always end up here.”
We are talking to New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save.
You made it time. If you want to look a little longer, just scroll back up and press “Continue.”
Look up.
Before you commute home to suburbs like Tarrytown and Larchmont, or race toward the next stop on your tourist map, take a minute.
Look up to see the stars.
One hundred and twenty-five feet above you are 2,500 stars and six signs of the zodiac along the ecliptic, a line that represents the path of the sun across the sky:
The signs are joined by a few others: Orion, Pegasus, Triangulum and, in the center of it all, Musca Borealis (the Northern fly, or sometimes called Apis, the bee). The Milky Way streaks across the ceiling in the opposite direction. The whole thing is ringed by intricate plaster moldings along the clerestory windows. Fifty-nine of the stars twinkle.
Who says there isn’t magic in Midtown?
The original early 1900s plan for the ceiling was to build a massive skylight so commuters could look up at the actual stars:
But time and money were short, so the architects asked the artist Paul Helleu to design a version of the sky on the ceiling instead. Helleu took inspiration from star atlases from the 1600s. His main resource was the Uranometria from 1603, a lushly illustrated volume that was the first detailed cataloging of individual stars, their positions and brightness. See how similar the figures are. This is Aries:
Here’s Taurus, the bull:
A heart balloon — one of several — had floated up the day we took this photograph, nestling between Orion’s club and Taurus’s horn (maybe an earthly sign that this heavenly hunt might finally resolve).
Converting the flat drawings of a spherical sky re-projected onto a semi-cylindrical vaulted ceiling would have been no easy task. The design work was done by a famous scenic designer and muralist, James Monroe Hewlett, and was overseen by the Columbia astronomy professor Harold Jacoby, who in 1910 assured a panicked public that Halley’s comet would not hit Earth.
Dozens of painters got to work. The terminal opened at midnight on Feb. 2, 1913. The New York Central Railroad boasted “that many school children will go to the Grand Central Terminal to study this representation of the heavens.”
Two weeks later, a commuter from New Rochelle (and a hobby astronomer) looked up at the ceiling and realized that west was east and east was west and the sky was not, actually, in a proper arrangement. Only Orion was shown in the “correct” orientation. He wrote a “wrathful” letter to the station. As The New York Times reported in 1913, officials at Grand Central “did not deny the charge that things were a bit mixed, but held that it was a pretty good ceiling for all that.”
How this happened is still a matter of debate, given Professor Jacoby’s astronomical blessing.
Michael Allison, a former NASA planetary scientist at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (and a former adjunct in the Columbia astronomy and astrophysics department), met me last month at the great clock under the ceiling to explain his theory.
“I’ve stared at the ceiling I don’t know how many hours,” he said. “I keep hoping I can discover one more thing.”
The liberties taken, Mr. Allison said, like re-sizing the constellations to fit the space and flipping Orion (in relation to the rest), were carefully done. Ultimately, a good marriage of art and science. He thinks Jacoby was a victim of big project bureaucracy, that it was all a mixup.
Jacoby probably expected the design he approved to be projected overhead, where the result would match the plans if you held them above you. The painters put them on the floor instead. Hence, the flip.
But this “heavenly view” — the stars as if they could be seen from above, looking down — may not be a bad view at all.
“There are just so many bad things happening in the world now that I think the sky offers a perspective that can lift us above that,” Mr. Allison said.
For Deirdre Newman, the great-granddaughter of the muralist Hewlett, who painted the ceiling, the imperfection “is what art is.”
Ms. Newman, it turns out, is also a painter of murals and ceilings. But these days, if she has to flip an image, she just hits a button on the projector.
“Anytime I make a mistake painting, I’m like, this proves that it’s art,” she said. “It is not perfection, and it shouldn’t be — it would be a sad thing if it was.”
The stories that we’ve given to the stars over millenniums, some of the most retold tales in history, are hardly orderly — stories of fate, violence, betrayal, revenge, sex and punishment. Cancer helps Hera in pinching a rival’s foot. Orion, son of Poseidon, is placed in the stars by Zeus, locked in an eternal hunt. The two fish of Pisces (Aphrodite and Eros) are linked together to escape the monster-of-all-monsters, Typhon.
Or the stories are totally different if you were Babylonian or Egyptian, Greek or Roman. Today, the stars mean something else again to a devoted user of the horoscope app Co-Star, seeking reassurance after a breakup. And to a commuter standing in Grand Central, looking up while waiting for the train, the stars might just be a momentary diversion, a decorative way to pass the time. Or more.
Take what you want. Take what you need.
***
By the 1940s, the ceiling had fallen into disrepair, so they painted a whole new one on four-foot-by-eight-foot asbestos sheets over the old one. This is the version that exists today. Eventually that second ceiling, too, grew dark with grime and had to be cleaned from 1996 to 1998. The difference was stark. As you were zooming in, you may have noticed a little dark square by Cancer. They deliberately left one bit of the uncleaned ceiling here:
The best time to take all of it in — the ceiling, and the majesty of the station — might just be coming this weekend. The setting sun will line up with Manhattan’s street grid and should (pending clouds) bathe the terminal in a beautiful golden glow Saturday at 8:19 p.m. and Sunday at 8:20 p.m. I plan to be on the east balcony looking west on Sunday for that moment.
See you there.
How we took the photograph
To generate a high-resolution panorama of the ceiling, The Times captured 232 close-up images. We then used software to stitch these photos into an equirectangular projection, to approximate the curve of the ceiling. We also developed custom computer vision software to ensure consistent color blending across varying lighting conditions. To optimize for display efficiency and clarity during navigation, the image was then re-projected into the shape of a cube. We think it’s still a pretty good picture for all that.
This is an installment in our series of experiments on art and attention. If you liked this one, you may like these past exercises: a finished, unfinished portrait; a sudden rain over a bridge; a unicorn tapestry; some buckets from Home Depot; and a Whistler painting.
Sign up to be notified when new installments are published here. And let us know how this exercise made you feel in the comments.
Welcome to Day 2 of the Metropolitan Diary challenge, part of our celebration of the column’s 50th anniversary. On Day 1, we gave you tips for identifying your New York City story. Today, we’ll help you write it. (Missed Day 1? It’s not too late to start.)
What makes for a good Diary? It’s simply a good story that happens to be set in, and capture, the essential New York-ness of the city. While this isn’t a full writing course, we do have guidance on the kinds of elements that the submissions we publish include. They typically have: a beginning, middle and end; sharp details; catchy dialogue; a bit of surprise; some humor, warmth or emotion. But there is no formula, so flouting these loose rules can be worthwhile.
Don’t worry if you don’t think of yourself as a “writer.” Focus on being a “storyteller.” Pretend you are telling your story to the person who’d most appreciate it, using whatever conversational language or pacing that would hold their attention. Do it out loud if you want, maybe give that person a call and tell them your story (or tell it to them again). Then write it down.
That’s the big picture. For more tips, read on.
Here is an example of a published Diary that we (and readers) really liked, and a few thoughts on why that may help crystallize yours.
Unacceptable
Dear Diary:
I went to a new bagel store in Brooklyn Heights1 with my son.
When it was my turn to order, I asked for a cinnamon raisin bagel with whitefish salad and a slice of red onion.2
The man behind the counter looked up at me.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t do that.”3
— Richie Powers
One of this item’s best qualities is that it is short and snappy. Only 53 words! Although we will use stories of up to 300 words, many don’t need to be that long and the column doesn’t work if we don’t have a mix of long, medium and short, so we are always looking for stuff like this. Here’s another one!
At Attention
Dear Diary:
It was December 1967. I had just finished basic training at Fort Dix in New Jersey and was traveling to Boston in uniform. For reasons I no longer recall, I stopped in New York City on the way.1
Walking on the Upper East Side2 in a snowstorm, I spied another man in a uniform. He was older, and his cap bore the familiar gold band that identified him as an officer.
I rendered a snappy salute. It was not returned. 3The uniform was unfamiliar, so I guessed he was a foreign officer. Military courtesy still required me to salute.
A little farther down the street, I encountered another officer and offered another salute that went unacknowledged.4 His uniform was strange to me as well.
The third time it happened, the man I saluted ignored me while holding the door for a couple 5on their way into a large apartment building.
I realized I had been saluting doormen.6
— Stephen Salisbury
To get your storytelling muscles going, think through or jot down the answers to some of these questions.
Let’s start with setting the scene.
- When and where in the city did this happen? Is this place well-known?
- Was there anything particular about that point in your life that’s relevant?
- What did you see, hear, smell? Was there something notable about the weather?
Now, let’s move to the middle, the meat of the story.
- Did you have an exchange with someone?
- What details are important to how events unfolded, especially in setting up the ending?
And now, the end.
- What’s the resolution? Is there a punchline?
- Does the story end with a sense of shared humanity or some other warm feeling that lingers? You don’t need to name it. A good description will often allow readers to feel it too.
- Why has this experience stayed with you?
- Lines like “and that’s why I love New York” are almost always unnecessary.
That’s it. Keep your story simple and use the kind of plain language you use in conversation. You are sketching a moment in time. The details are important. Let them move the story along. Have fun and good luck.
Once you’re done, read through what you’ve got. What details are less important and can be left out? (Remember, there is a strict 300-word limit.)
Write your Metropolitan Diary however you like, on paper, on your phone or wherever! When you’re happy with what you’ve written, put your diary entry into the box below, fill out your information and submit it. You might just hear from me about including it in a future column.
This is the official submission form, so make sure to double-check your work before hitting submit.
That’s it! Submit your Metropolitan Diary.
By transmitting your submission, you grant The New York Times Company a perpetual, royalty-free license to use the submission in any medium. They may be edited, and may be republished and adapted in all media. You may reprint your story elsewhere after it appears in The Times.
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