Andy Warhol Keith Haring Jean-Michel Basquiat As the landscape of New York City has changed over the years, it has become harder and harder to square the myths of the past with the present day. The Palladium was one of the city’s most prominent nightclubs, attended by the likes of, and. The latter two artists painted large murals for the club, which began its life as a concert hall designed by Thomas W. Lamb. Haring painted his massive, 10-meter-long mural to coincide with the club’s opening in 1985.

The space proved to be a creative hub for more than just visual artists: New wave, house, and techno music blossomed there in the 1990s. But, as New Yorkers well know, the gritty downtown Manhattan of yesteryear is gone, replaced by soaring rents and the purple sweaters of New York University (NYU) students. That school bought the Palladium in the late ’90s, eventually tearing it down to build more dorms. Though perhaps meant as an homage, that NYU also decided to name its bland housing complex “Palladium Hall” only highlights the distance between the New York of today and that of the early ’80s and ’90s. The works are held by the artists’ estates but they will never again be seen in their intended context.





Art Deco bas-reliefs, Bonwit Teller building

Created 1929 • Destroyed 1980





Donald Trump courted controversy and a reputation for destruction long before his current presidential campaign. In 1979, when he was a relatively unknown New York real estate developer (the mind boggles), a 33-year-old Trump acquired the historic Art Deco Bonwit Teller building, only to demolish it a year later to build what would become Trump Tower. He promised, however, to save two 15-foot-high bas-relief panels that adorned the Teller building and donate them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art should he be able to remove them. Despite his word, the “pieces that had been sought with enthusiasm by the Metropolitan Museum of Art…were smashed by jackhammers yesterday on the orders of a real estate developer,” as the New York Times report from the time tells it.

That unnamed developer was Trump, and the paper condemned his actions. Trump’s organization retorted that the two-ton panels lacked “artistic merit,” and that saving them would have created an undue delay on construction and cost $500,000 (that figure was a fraction of the total cost of the building, which was estimated at $100 million). The Vice President of the Met’s board, Ashton Hawkins, provided a dismayed quote to the Times, saying that “architectural sculptures of this quality are rare and would have made definite sense in our collections. Their monetary value was not what we were interested in.”





Richard Serra, Tilted Arc

Created 1981 • Removed 1989