In May 1923, a determined seventeen-year-old boy stared out from a page of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Above his thick blond hair ran the headline Helps Build Queens. Two paragraphs announced to the world that this teenager, Fred C. Trump, envisioned “a big future in the building industry.” He would become a “builder,” he declared.
The borough of Queens was exploding with growth all around him. The population had roughly tripled since his birth and would double again by 1930. His alma mater—Richmond Hill High School—had been built for eight hundred students but was already jammed with two thousand teenagers. Classes were held on the front steps. Students waited in line for a desk in the study hall.
Outside, the streets teamed with new arrivals, mostly from Germany and Russia. The demand for housing was unyielding. It was a time when a paved street and a sewer line were luxuries notable enough to mention in an advertisement. Former farms and forests in Queens offered vast stretches of open land, newly within reach of Manhattan. After the Queensboro Bridge had connected the boroughs in 1909, train lines and trollies pushed farther and farther out. Real estate developers rushed to the site of each new train stop and advertised homes to Manhattan-bound commuters: “5-cent fare zone!”
Amid this epic building boom, Fred Trump worked incessantly to find his place. He ignored his school’s extracurricular activities—the sports teams, the acting and singing troupes, the chapter of Arista, an honor society. Instead, he worked, earning money and learning how to build homes. He delivered building supplies to construction sites with a horse-drawn wagon. He took a job as an assistant foreman with a construction company. He eventually built a garage for a neighbor. He would come to believe that even his choice of childhood toys—blocks and erector sets—foretold his destiny.
In some measure, his interest in real estate tracked the unfulfilled dreams of his late father. His parents, Frederick and Elizabeth, had arrived from Germany during an earlier immigration wave, in the late 1800s. Frederick traveled to the western frontier, where he ran a restaurant that had once also operated as a brothel. He returned to New York City to manage a restaurant and pursue small real estate investments. He bought his young family a simple two-story house on a dirt road in the Woodhaven section of Queens, one block south of the bustling Jamaica Plank Road, then a key route packed with horse-drawn carriages making the journey to Manhattan from the farms of Long Island. Their neighbors mostly rented their homes and worked as janitors, house painters, store clerks, and in the shipyard.
Frederick’s real estate career had just begun to gain momentum when he was struck down by the Spanish flu, the pandemic then ravaging the world. He died in 1918 at the age of forty-nine, leaving Elizabeth alone to raise their three children: Fred, twelve, John, ten, and Elizabeth, fourteen. They would not be destitute. Frederick left his wife an estate valued at $36,000, the equivalent of more than $800,000 today, mostly in the form of money due on loans he had made to builders and the value of a few vacant lots.
Elizabeth assumed the role of the family’s business leader. While Fred was still in high school, his mother hired contractors and oversaw the building of homes on the vacant lots she owned. She had designs on creating a family real estate company with her three children. John, who had a way with figures and details, would become the architect. Elizabeth, her oldest, would run the office. And Fred would become the builder. She formed the first Trump family enterprise, E. Trump & Son, artfully masking her own gender and her two sons’ youth.
Fred threw himself into the role. He took classes at a local YMCA in carpentry, and more classes to understand blueprints and engineering. He and his mother began buying undeveloped land. They did not borrow money to build. They would pay cash for a lot or two, Fred would work frantically to build a house, and they would offer it for sale before he had finished in hopes of using the proceeds to buy another piece of land. By the time Fred was in his early twenties, he and his mother regularly placed classified advertisements to sell homes under the E. Trump & Son name, offering easy terms for buyers.
By 1925, Elizabeth and her children moved a little farther out, to the neighborhood known as Jamaica, a name thought to be derived from the Native Americans known as Jameco, or Yamecah, who once lived there. The Trumps bought a house south of Hillside Avenue, the dividing line between the modest homes and tight lots of Jamaica to the south and a new world of wealth to the north, christened Jamaica Estates.
Jamaica Estates had been founded by an early generation of New York real estate royalty, nineteenth-century men with cookie-duster mustaches and formidable bearings. The best known of them was Felix Isman, considered to be worth $30 million in his early thirties and famous for having said a man could be correct about New York real estate only three quarters of the time and still make money.
Another Jamaica Estates founder, Michael J. Degnon, had been instrumental in construction of the Williamsburg Bridge over the East River, much of the new subway system under Manhattan, and a massive industrial park in Queens. Degnon himself bought the most prime swath of land in the area, a sixteen-acre plot atop the hill rising behind the owner’s lodge. He commissioned a stone mansion surrounded by streams and forest. Newspapers articles of the time claimed that the highest ground in Jamaica Estates offered views of the Atlantic Ocean to the south and Long Island Sound to the north.
Isman, Degnon, and the other founders had modeled Jamaica Estates after an exclusive gated community in Orange County, north of New York City, known as Tuxedo Park. The black suits and ties with crisp, white shirts favored by the men of the community came to be known as tuxedos. Jamaica Estates would not have a gate, but it would have a stone gatehouse where Midland Parkway, conceived as the most exclusive address in the community, began its path north from Hillside Avenue. To the right of the entrance, the founders constructed a large Elizabethan-style lodge. They hired a famous landscape architect to incorporate the parklike qualities of the area into the street design, with roadways gently arcing around mature trees and hills. The founders gave streets names that evoked English estates—Cambridge, Devonshire, and Wexford Terrace. There would be tennis courts near the entrance, and a golf course on another neighborhood border.
For all their experience, the founders’ vision to create an enclave of extreme wealth did not hold. The original partnership dissolved in discord. The neighborhood would remain a pocket of greater wealth than the working-class Jamaica all around it, but one of the mere professional classes. In one long weekend, two thousand lots in Jamaica Estates were sold off by Joseph P. Day, a famous real estate auctioneer of the early twentieth century. Weeks of advertisements and articles in the city’s newspapers created a frenzy. More than fourteen hundred potential bidders showed up to sit under a large tent across Midland Parkway from the owner’s lodge and buy multiple lots. If Fred and Elizabeth did not attend, they most certainly were aware of the spectacle.
From the bedroom where Fred Trump slept in his early twenties, he could walk three minutes north to Hillside Avenue and gaze up at the Degnon mansion, the estate of the legendary builder. He aimed his life toward earning a place in Jamaica Estates alongside the Ismans and Degnons of the world.
A year after he and his mother began regularly selling the homes he had built, they placed an advertisement in The Chat, a Brooklyn newspaper, that read “Builder will sell his own home,” offering their six-room house just below Hillside Avenue for $9,250. Fred built them a house a few blocks north on Devonshire Road. He was not yet thirty years old. For the rest of his life, he would call Jamaica Estates his home.
Only Fred continued in the line of work about which his father had dreamed for himself and his mother had imagined for her children. His siblings went in different directions. John headed to college at the Polytechnic Institute, where he would be class valedictorian, and then to earn a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he became a respected professor and researcher. Their sister, Elizabeth, married a banker named William Walter, and they moved into one of Fred’s early homes.
After several years of building modest houses in other neighborhoods, Fred set his sights on the wealthier buyers in Jamaica Estates. He built sixteen homes along both sides of Wareham Road, the next street over from the premiere addresses along Midland Parkway. Unlike his prior focus on utilitarian simplicity, these homes would feature architectural details and modern amenities. Most would be Tudor revivals, with multiple gabled rooflines and a mix of stone, brick, and wood-trimmed stucco. They featured landscaped yards and two-car garages. Then twenty-five years old, Fred spoke with a reporter about his experiences with discerning buyers during “my ten years in the building and developing field.” He listed the homes at prices ranging from $17,500 to $30,000, multiples of anything he had built before.
“Stroll around this parklike section,” urged his advertisement in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. “You will wonder that this community, so like the aristocratic estates of Old England, is within the limits of New York, and but twenty minutes from Broadway.
“No detail has been spared that these homes might suit the individuality of the high type residents in this community.”
At the bottom of the advertisement, there was no reference to his mother. Only one name appeared, offset by the job title that might have seemed like a distant dream just a few years earlier: “FRED C. TRUMP, Builder.”
Fred Trump remade himself as a builder for the “high types” just as the national economy collapsed into the worst depression in the nation’s history. Hundreds of thousands of properties were lost to foreclosure. Newspapers featured long lines of recently unemployed men waiting for food handouts. Nearly one quarter of Americans were out of work, with the construction industry particularly hard hit. Roughly half of all construction jobs had disappeared as home building slowed to a crawl.
As the economy hit its nadir, Fred returned to Woodhaven. He built a one-story box of a building near the house where he had grown up. He hung a sign outside—Trump Markets—and tried his hand at a new type of business, the supermarket, a reimagining of the grocery store with everything the modern homemaker needed under one roof, saving her separate trips to the butcher, the fishmonger, and the fruit stand. It was a concept created by a neighbor in Jamaica Estates, Michael J. Cullen, who had opened what was thought to be the first supermarket, King Kullen, several years earlier. After proudly advocating his aristocratic estates, Fred now peddled “genuine spring legs of lamb” for seventeen cents a pound, along with Chesterfield cigarettes, crab meat, cleaning supplies, dog food, and house paint.
Fred Trump, the grocer, would be a brief diversion. Months after he opened the market, an opportunity arose from the economic devastation. A decades-old financial house, J. Lehrenkrauss Corporation, crumbled in scandal. Fred bid in bankruptcy court for its mortgage-servicing business, eventually partnering with another bidder, a man named William Demm, to win the portfolio of failing mortgages and properties facing foreclosure. During the process, he became impressed with Demm’s lawyer, William Hyman, an athletic-looking, blue-eyed son of Jewish immigrants from Europe. Fred soon parted ways with Demm, but he and Hyman formed a long-standing bond.
Nominally back in real estate, Fred sold his supermarket to Cullen and swore to himself he would never put his name on a business again. He focused his energies on selling the properties in the Lehrenkrauss portfolio. Cleaning up the mess in a failed lender’s real estate portfolio, while a substantial endeavor for a young man finding his way through a horrible economy, was not how Fred had envisioned his career unfolding. But his fortunes were about to take a dramatic turn thanks to the federal government’s efforts to deal with the economic calamity.
By 1934, Franklin Delano Roosevelt desperately wanted to get hammers back in the hands of construction workers. A year into his presidency, and with the nation locked in a deep depression, he was frustrated that the industry, a major driver of jobs in the 1920s, had not begun to turn around as quickly as others. He thought kick-starting home construction could also improve the “terrible conditions” of housing in much of the country, like the crowded tenement buildings on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, without sanitation or lighting.
But Roosevelt wrestled with how to accomplish those goals. During one confidential briefing with reporters, Roosevelt described the letters he had traded with his “very old friend” Joseph P. Day, the New York real estate man who had auctioned off lots in Jamaica Estates. Day told him that builders wanted the government to stay out of home building, insisting that “it is not the prerogative of government” and would be like the “terrible socialism” of some European states. Day admitted that private developers would not, on their own, see enough of a profit motive to build housing for millions of lower-income Americans, but he had faith that the market would “work itself out some way.” Roosevelt was not willing to sit idly by and hope for the best, which he described as government and private enterprise throwing up their collective hands and saying, “We are licked.”
“That is his answer, ‘We are licked,’ ” Roosevelt told the reporters. “And if somebody asks the question, ‘Is government going to consider itself licked in its effort to take care of people who cannot otherwise be taken care of?’ The answer is, obviously, ‘No!’ ”
That tension between government intervention and a purely free-market approach would shape the contours of federal housing programs for decades to come. The Roosevelt administration’s first attempt to straddle those competing interests was the creation of the Federal Housing Administration.
Authorized by the National Housing Act of 1934, the FHA forever changed the economics of home buying in the country. Private lenders had historically been so worried about borrower defaults that they lent mostly only to people who did not need the money: loans had to be repaid within three to five years and would at most cover half of a home’s value. The new rules would also allow for a repayment period of up to thirty years and loans of 80 percent of the home’s value, easing payments for millions of homebuyers. The FHA would guarantee that homebuyers paid back their mortgages, opening a torrent of funding for construction by reducing the risk to the private sector.
Roosevelt recognized that millions of lower-income families would still be left out. And in practice, the FHA would refuse to insure mortgages to nearly all African Americans, under the notion that neighborhoods with “inharmonious groups”—or “people of [a] different race, color, nationality and culture”—led to “the destruction of value.” As home ownership became the primary vehicle of wealth growth of most Americans, the FHA’s practices set Black and white families on starkly different economic trajectories for the decades to come. The new agency soon issued rules for homes eligible for mortgage insurance, pages and pages of minimum construction and design standards. Fred Trump saw before him an opportunity to profitably build modest homes. He would never again aim for “high type” buyers of single-family houses that he had pursued in Jamaica Estates. He and a partner purchased lots to build more than four hundred homes on the former Barnum & Bailey circus grounds in Brooklyn, a bigger project than anything he had ever done. He posted signs that read Trump Homes. Beyond them, as far as the eye could see down a long city block, hundreds of his masons and carpenters worked on fifty or more homes at a time, with a row of structures rising in unison. City newspapers began calling Fred “the Henry Ford of the building industry” for his assembly-line approach, a moniker Fred would use in advertisements. He would dig holes for the foundations of an entire block all at once, and then use high-speed mixers to pour the concrete. He set up long stretches of scaffolding so his brick masons could assemble a dozen homes at one time. Bricklaying for an entire block sometimes took only one week. The homes would sell for as little as $4,390, with loans backed by the FHA. When the model home for the circus grounds project opened in August 1936, the state FHA director, Thomas G. Grace, showed up to kick off the event. After the ceremony, there were so many potential buyers that Fred Trump installed floodlights to add a nighttime shift.
As he worked around the clock in Brooklyn, according to family lore, Fred found time to go to a party attended by younger women from Scotland. Among them was Mary Anne MacLeod, a tall and lanky woman in her early twenties. As a teenager, she had left her rural village in Scotland, where her father was a fisherman and small-time farmer, to join two of her sisters in the Astoria section of Queens and find work as a maid. Mary, a native Gaelic speaker, spoke the English she had learned in school with a thick accent. Trump family lore does not explain how a recent immigrant living in Astoria and a workaholic young real estate developer living ten miles away in Jamaica Estates wound up at the same social function. Whatever the case, their courtship was a quick one.
Fred Trump, thirty, and Mary Anne MacLeod, twenty-three, married on January 11, 1936, at a Presbyterian church in Manhattan. Her hometown newspaper in Scotland, the Stornoway Gazette, reported that the bride wore a “princess gown of white satin and a tulle cap and veil” and carried a bouquet of white orchids and lilies of the valley. The ceremony was followed by a reception dinner for about twenty-five people at the Carlyle hotel, where guests were served a sit-down dinner of chicken au cresson and French Sauterne wine. After a brief trip to Atlantic City, Fred returned to work. His mother, Elizabeth, moved out of the house on Devonshire Road and into a small apartment nearby. The following year, Fred and Mary welcomed their first child, Maryanne, followed by a son, Fred Jr., in 1938.
Fred worked harder and longer days than ever, becoming one of the most prolific home builders in the country, all of it fueled by FHA-backed mortgages. He spent twelve hours a day on job sites, directing every task. He still controlled costs as if he were just starting out. He did not have an office and kept his financial records in his pocket. He did not borrow money—he boasted of writing five-figure checks to buy land and materials—and paid his workers and contractors in cash.
No expense was too small to reduce. He would turn off any lights that had been unnecessarily left on and water down paint. The story told over and over to capture Fred Trump’s strict adherence to cost control is of him picking up unbent nails from the dust at construction sites and passing them on for one of his carpenters to use. Maybe the point of the practice was only to make a point. At the cost of nails in the late 1930s, Fred Trump would have had to scrounge up thirteen nails just to save one penny.
He delegated nothing of importance. He generally did not hire permanent employees until late in the 1930s, when he brought on Charles H. Luerssen Jr., the grandson of German immigrants, as his sales manager, and Luerssen’s wife, Amy, the daughter of an Italian immigrant, as an executive assistant. Amy would remain Fred Trump’s closest aide and favorite lunch companion for the rest of his life. Many would refer to her as Fred’s secretary, but his family and insiders would come to see her as the chief operating officer, perhaps the only person outside the family whom Fred trusted completely.
His tight control of costs extended to his closest colleagues, even his longtime lawyer, William Hyman. Hyman’s son, Milton, recalled decades later with a laugh, “He liked my pop a lot, but he never paid him much.”
A feature article in American Builder, a trade magazine, said Fred was one of the few builders in the country to finish more than 150 homes a year. A photograph showed him sitting on a retaining wall at a construction site, surrounded by loose bricks, tossed lumber, and soil, wearing a long-sleeve shirt and tie with a straw fedora tilted back on his forehead. Lean and smiling broadly, he looked completely in his element, with a blueprint draped across his lap. The writer, Joseph B. Mason, then the East Coast editor of the journal and an advocate for the construction industry, marveled at Fred’s ability to find undervalued sites and tailor his marketing to the predominant culture of the surrounding community, stressing the proximity to Catholic churches and parochial schools in one neighborhood, and synagogues and yeshivas in another.
The involvement of the FHA eased everything for Fred Trump and his buyers. Builders could readily obtain construction loans based on the total appraised value of their project by the FHA. For effective builders, there were cost savings from scale. Fred liked to say that a home of the size and quality of his row houses would rent for $75 a month, but could be bought for $43 a month, with just a $590 down payment. Buyers agreed. He held an open house in East Flatbush when he finished the first few of more than two hundred homes. So many potential buyers showed up that he had his crew build a makeshift gangplank to the front door of model homes so more people could take a look.
“When the big crowds arrived, I was dumbfounded,” he said. “I never expected such a gathering, and I was not prepared to meet it.”
He became a prominent promoter of home ownership in New York, though he could sound almost robotic with his nasally voice. He occasionally took awkward stabs at humor. After one of his new buyers welcomed a baby, Fred told a reporter for the New York Daily News that “even the stork endorses and approves of home ownership these days.” At one point he hired a publicist to push his goals of increasing interest in home buying. He advocated for New York State to include a bossy motto on its license plates: “Own a Home.” State officials instead went with “N.Y. World’s Fair.”
That was not far off message for Fred Trump. The 1939 World’s Fair put Queens and modern home building at the center of the universe. The fair featured a mock neighborhood of twenty-one single-family homes billed as the “Town of Tomorrow.” Fred sent five hundred of his craftsmen and sales staff to the fair and offered cash prizes to the workers who found the best ways to make homes he had under construction more modern and comfortable. The winner reported seeing an illuminated doorknob with a magnetic keyhole, easing nighttime entry into one’s home.
Fred offered to cover the admission costs for up to five thousand people unable to afford tickets because of the Depression. With millions still relying on government aid or salaries from Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, Fred said he and others who had become wealthy during the Depression should feel a responsibility to open the majestic event to all comers. “I refer to the vast number of people on relief and workers for the W.P.A., who, unless something is done along the lines suggested, will have to sadly admit for the rest of their lives that they missed the world’s greatest pageant of education, history, amusement staged almost at their doorsteps, because they could not afford to go.”
Thanks to the FHA, the Great Depression had turned into a Golden Age for home builders like Fred Trump, who had become one of the leading home builders of his generation. He continued to find large stretches of undeveloped land, even as the war in Europe cast doubt on the real estate market.
In April 1941, he purchased a fifty-five-acre plot in southern Brooklyn. It was bordered on one side by the new Bensonhurst Park and on another side by the recently completed Belt Parkway, which ran along the waterfront and offered the potential of a quick commute to Manhattan. The seller was Joseph P. Day, who had been unable to move forward with a plan to build apartment houses on the site for several years. Fred Trump was now doing business with a real estate titan of his childhood, and he vowed to outdo Day’s performance. He would spend $500,000 in cash—the equivalent of more than $10 million today—to buy the land and install sewers. He expressed confidence that he would move quickly—not get stuck paying carrying costs as the prior owner had done.
“There is a natural virgin market for thousands of F.H.A. homes in this section of Bensonhurst,” he said. “I do not believe in holding vacant property, and to assure its quick development, I have offered several other builders the opportunity of joining with me.”
A writer for The Brooklyn Daily Eagle visited the construction site and used the language of military precision to praise Fred’s deployment of his crews, how he directed “constantly advancing divisions of skilled craftsmen. Mr. Trump has achieved complete co-ordination between platoons of hustling masons, bricklayers, plasterers, carpenters, plumbers and a mobile column of giant cranes, tractors, steam shovels, mechanized mortars, ditch digging and finishing machines. The Trump system is a far cry from the days of the pick and shovel, wheel barrow and hand mixer.”
Less than eight months after acquiring the property, Fred opened his first model homes on the site. Another 140 homes were under construction. Fred touted the value of the FHA homes—which he said would cost buyers as little as forty dollars a month for mortgage, taxes, and water—for “the finest location on which we have ever built homes.”
That edition of the Eagle quoting an optimistic Fred Trump rolled off the presses on December 7, 1941, just as Japanese Zeros broke the morning silence over Pearl Harbor.