Trump's Golf Course, a Lesson in Inequality - New York Times

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Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point, which opened this spring, was paid for by New York City, to the sum of $127 million. Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times

If the thought of Donald Trump has been lodged in your head of late, exclusively as a Republican presidential candidate, defamer of immigrants and thrice-wed champion of traditional marriage, then it may have escaped your attention that a lush and extravagant municipal golf course bearing his name â€" Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point â€" opened this spring on the southeastern shoreline of the Bronx. Paid for by New York City, to the sum of $127 million, and maintained by the Trump organization, the course offers the kind of visual lessons in inequality that make statistics and editorials and Thomas Piketty seem ponderously inefficient.

The view from the hilly course, designed by Jack Nicklaus, accommodates the entirety of the Manhattan skyline across the East River; from one vantage point, all you see is 432 Park Avenue protruding from billionaire’s row. A stretch of housing projects borders the links and so does a tightly packed cemetery, St. Raymond’s, near the Whitestone Bridge, a reminder that in New York death really is an extension of life â€" so much noise and not enough room.

For years, the notion that a luxury golf course would be built in the city’s most impoverished borough struck many as the equivalent of handing a camisole to a person with frostbite. The justification had been not simply that the enterprise would constitute a means of job creation for Bronx residents â€" which indeed it has â€" but also that the course would be so challenging in its play and so indistinguishable from a country club in its sensibility that it would attract major championship competition and in turn millions of dollars in revenue for the city.

But how likely is it now that the United States Open, so dependent on corporate sponsorships, will be scheduled on a public course named for someone who said he is committed to building a wall at the Mexican border to keep out drug dealers and “rapists”? Although you could argue that none of his comments could have been anticipated, getting blindsided by craziness from Mr. Trump is like landing at a monastery only to be surprised that it’s quiet.

A day after Mr. Trump told the Golf Channel that he had “tremendous support from the golf world because they all know I’m right,” the country’s major professional golf associations issued a joint statement saying, “Mr. Trump’s comments are inconsistent with our strong commitment to an inclusive and welcoming environment in the game of golf.”

That followed the move on the part of NBC Universal to sever ties with Mr. Trump on his television projects and an announcement from the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce that it would no longer consider Trump hotels as sites for two conventions next year that make up the largest meetings of Hispanic business leaders in the country.

“He has no idea what’s coming,” the organization’s president, Javier Palomarez, told me. “The Hispanic community is really galvanized around this.”

Mr. Trump’s involvement in the Ferry Point project highlights the problematic nature of public-private partnerships and the mistakes we make when we assign amusement-value status to people who might actually mean what they say. His position in the presidential race, catering to the far right, leaves him saying so many things potentially threatening to his business interests that it raises the question of whether he really is as much an ideologue as he is an entertainer.

In a statement saying that he found Mr. Trump’s remarks “offensive and disgusting,” Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, added that the city would review its contracts with the Trump organization, which is receiving five years of free rent at Ferry Point while Mr. Trump builds a $10 million clubhouse that the company expects to finish next year.

At the same time, the city itself has not been an exemplary steward at Ferry Point, and what it has reaped from the Trump deal isn’t necessarily obvious. When the construction of the golf course got underway during the Bloomberg administration after a long and complicated history, the city offered certain palliatives in an attempt at precluding and appeasing the inevitable critics. One of the concessions, a nine-and-a-half-acre community park that separates one thread of the course’s perimeter from the Throggs Neck Houses, still doesn’t have a bathroom three years after it opened. While it is under construction, water fountains and sprinklers remain inoperable. (One young mother told me that she remembered a drinking fountain working once, last year, though when she went to use it the water was hot.)

On a recent afternoon, the playground, which looks like a Scandinavian experiment of the kind that might forgo the placement of actual swings, asking children to instead close their eyes and imagine them, was sparsely populated. Several parents told me that was fairly typical, given how little there was to do there. “This is basically a playground with a slide,” the father of a 2-year-old girl said. Many more children were occupying themselves in the playgrounds of the projects across the street, which were better equipped.

The vast expanse of Ferry Point Park that lies opposite the golf course on the other side of the Whitestone Bridge, a park crowded on the weekends with Latino immigrants, has been teased with the prospect of amenities for decades. In the 1930s, Robert Moses planned a beach, bathhouse and bus terminal there. “Unfortunately, the plan was never implemented,” the parks department website notes. Three years ago, when I visited for the first time, the department said that bathrooms in that part of the park were about to be built. They still don’t exist, according to the department, because of delays related to Hurricane Sandy.

There’s no doubt that Mr. Trump could get them done faster. But who wants to ask him?