Before Donald Trump made a name for himself as a peddler of steaks, a purveyor of insults, a poster child of self-tanner, and a presidential candidate (sigh), he was a real estate mogul. But not a respectable one. The Trump Organization has left a trail of bad deals and banal buildings in its wake, from letting an entire city crumble and profiting from its demise to scamming architects out of fees. Here’s a shortlist of his misdeeds to architecture and architects.

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[Photo: Flickr user m01229 Trump, Enemy Of Historic Preservation

Trump Tower–the hulking Manhattan skyscraper that looks just as foreboding as the super villain who built it–has been the site of designer-led election protests. But before architect Der Scutt‘s glass monolith occupied the corner of Fifth Avenue and 56th street, the plot of land was home to the Bonwit Teller building, an Art Deco–style department store constructed in 1929. The facade featured magnificent limestone relief sculptures. The Met museum convinced Trump to donate them to its collection. He agreed, but reneged on his deal and demolished them, citing an appraiser who claimed the pieces were without artistic merit and not worth the $32,000 cost of removing them properly and $500,000 for project delays. In The Trumps, writer Gwenda Blair included a footnote with an anecdote from architect Alan Lapidus, who visited Trump’s office and spotted a fragment of the relief. “When I asked him what the carving was doing there, he leaned forward to me and said, ‘Shut up.'” [Photo: Flickr user IAmSanjeevan Trump, Fan Of Garishness (Yet Desperate For Praise)

One of Trump’s first big projects was the conversion of the Commodore Hotel–a 1919 building near Grand Central–in to the Grand Hyatt, completed in 1980. The aesthetic he established there–a glass facade with a metallic sheen to it–would be replicated time and again. Architect Peter Samton, a principal of the firm Gruzen Samton, was the lead on the hotel’s design and urged sensitivity to its historic neighbors, but Trump wouldn’t hear it. “He was interested in making his own statement and he told us, ‘I like new shiny things. I don’t like granite, I much prefer glass, stainless steel, and shiny marble. That was our palette from day one,'” Samton tells Co.Design. “Nothing we could say or do would change that. This was well before the start of landmarking buildings; historic preservation really wasn’t thought of much then.” For all the tower’s garishness, Trump was desperate for critical approval. “He . . . wanted to get the maximum publicity he could,” Samton says. “He knew we were friendly with Paul Goldberger, who was the architectural critic of the New York Times then. Trump pleaded with us to get Goldberger to the opening. He wanted to meet him.”

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