How The Trumps Brought Death And Destruction To Coney Island | NowThis

Описание: The Trumps once forced 900 mostly Black families living in Coney Island out of their homes — here's how the family used taxpayer money to decimate a New York neighborhood,
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DENSON: ‘Coney Island is a neighborhood in Brooklyn. There are 60,000 people who live here. And it was known for all these immigrant cultures mixing.

Fred Trump, the father of Donald Trump, was involved in so many scandals in Coney Island.

What happened in the 1950s was, there was an area of Coney Island on Ocean Parkway, which was referred to as ‘the Gut.’ It was a real mixed neighborhood. Fred Trump thought that this site would be better if he had it.’

When NYC zoned the Gut for ‘urban renewal,’ Fred Trump saw an opportunity. He used his political connections to gain these sites. He would replace the homes in the Gut with Trump Village. When it was declared an urban renewal area, all these people had to be relocated. All of this took place between 1960 and 1962.

Charles Denson recorded some of the displaced families’ stories

RONALD STEWART: I was about 11, maybe going on 12 years-old. They had tore down a lot of the houses.

DENSON: Do you remember what year this was?

STEWART: This must have been ’62. And I didn’t know who Mr. Trump was. Men came to the house and we were told that we had to move.

He then gained federal housing funds and then overcharged the tenants and overestimated all of his costs. So he was accused of windfalls of millions of dollars.

African American members of that community were not offered apartments in Trump Village. The white members of that community were.

So you had 900 families, African American families, almost entirely, who had to be relocated.

DENSON: And this became another one of Fred Trump’s scams. What he did was to collect a relocation fee from the city. He made a profit on each family that was relocated, and he took these families and put them into the summer bungalows of the west end of Coney Island.

The owners would say, ‘Well, we don’t have heat. They’re not winterized.’ He said, ‘Ah, you’ll put in space heaters.’

They had bad wiring. They couldn’t handle the space heaters. A lot of these bungalows burned. There were many deaths. Children died in these bungalow fires over the years.

I witnessed this, and I documented it. Starting when I was 11 or 12 years-old, I began photographing the neighborhood.

Here you can see one of the bungalow colonies, and here is a fire in the bungalows. These fires were a constant part of my childhood here.

They were almost all African American families. It’s well documented that Trump was racist in his apartment rentals.

#Trump #Trumps #ConeyIsland

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