This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The building with which Donald Trump made his name in Manhattan real estate is facing the wrecking ball.

The large Grand Hyatt hotel, next to Grand Central Terminal on 42nd Street, is being sold to developers, who plan to tear it down.

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Developer TF Cornerstone is set to buy the property with an investment firm that manages billionaire computer mogul Michael Dell’s money, the developer said on Thursday. They plan to replace the 26-floor hotel with a new, 2 million square foot skyscraper that will include offices, stores and a smaller hotel.

The hotel was Trump’s first splash in Manhattan real estate. He and the Hyatt Corporation bought what was then the Commodore hotel in the 1970s and refurbished it into the glass tower that stands today.

“The lobby was so dingy it looked like a welfare hotel,” Trump wrote in his book The Art of the Deal. “There were thousands of well-dressed Connecticut and Westchester commuters flooding on to the streets from Grand Central Terminal and the subway stations below. The city was on the verge of bankruptcy, but what I saw was a superb location.”

At the time, New York was in a deep fiscal crisis and few other developers were interested in buying the hotel, built in 1919, from the bankrupt Penn Central Corporation.

But Trump, whose father had built a fortune with a sprawling and utilitarian real estate portfolio in the city’s outer boroughs, was eager to make it to the big time in Manhattan. As part of the deal, he got guaranteed loans from his father and generous tax abatements from the city.

“I believed, perhaps to an irrational degree, that Manhattan was always going to be the best place to live – the center of the world,” his book says.

Trump opened the new hotel just before the start of the 1980s economic boom, and was soon renting rooms for as much as $1,100 a night.

The president is no longer connected to the hotel. He sold his stake in 1996.

The new project will include a Grand Hyatt with 500 rooms, down from 1,298 in the current hotel.

The project requires approval from the state and city. The city recently passed a zoning overhaul in the area around Grand Central to promote the construction of new skyscrapers.