Dispirited Place: Donald J. Trump State Park

This park in New York's lovely Hudson Valley has been neglected and little used since Trump donated the land in 2006. Dems have introduced a bill to change its name. But whose fault is it really?

Entrance to the French Hill section/ Photo: M. Balter

“There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”

— Wendell Berry

Regular readers of this newsletter know that I sometimes post travel essays, under the heading “Spirit of Place” (a phrase I stole from Lawrence Durrell’s great collection of travel pieces with that title.) Generally they are about places where people might want to go.

This post introduces a new category, “Dispirited Place,” where people probably don’t want to go. I hope I don’t have to do too many of them.

Back in 1998, Donald J. Trump, then known best as a New York real estate wheeler-dealer of dubious ethics and chronic lack of honesty—years before he became a U.S. president best known for dubious ethics and chronic lack of honesty—purchased 436 acres of Hudson Valley forest land in two parcels in and around the town of Yorktown Heights. His idea was to build two championship golf courses. He only paid $2.75 million for it, a steal even then.

But local politicians would not approve the project for environmental and other reasons (perhaps he should have bribed someone before he bought it.) So in 2006, he donated the land to New York state for a park, on the condition that it would bear his name. Some have pointed out that, at the same time, Trump was trying to save his three casinos in Atlantic City, which were bleeding money in huge losses. The implication is that Trump needed a big tax write-off (more on that in a minute; some good histories of all this, which I am using for sources, can be found here and here.)

So, in April 2006, Republican NY governor George Pataki officially inaugurated the park. Trump apparently did not show up to the ceremony, but he did issue a statement that the donation “is my way of trying to give back” and that the land would “turn into one of the most beautiful parks anywhere in the world.”

That was quite a modest statement for Trump. If it were today, he would no doubt call it “the greatest park anywhere in the world.”

Except that it isn’t anywhere close to being the greatest park. It’s not even a good park. It was never developed by the state, officially “closed” in 2010 as part of state park budget cuts, and today is seldom visited and totally neglected. (Despite it being “closed” anyone can still visit the two sections of the park, which are still indicated by signposts on the Taconic Parkway.)

One explanation for this might be that Pataki was the last Republican governor New York has had. Since 2007 Albany has been in the hands of Democrats, none of whom have shown any interest in making a park named after Donald J. Trump a nice place.

Over the years, politicians and activists have proposed changing the name of the park, and there have been several candidates, including calling it George Floyd State Park. Probably the most popular idea has been to rename it after the singer-songwriter-local activist Pete Seeger; indeed, a Change.org petition has nearly reached its goal of 25,000 signatures as of this writing. (A counter-petition to give the land back to Trump has garnered three signatures as of this writing.)

So now here is the “news hook” for this post, which purist journalists and editors would say should have come at the beginning. Last week, New York Assemblywoman Dana Levenberg and state senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal reintroduced legislation that could lead to Donald J. Trump’s name being taken off of the state park, and someone else’s (a player to be named later) substituted in its place.

The long and muddy road… Photo: C. Kendall

Inspired by this dramatic lawmaking coup—and the fact that Donald J. Trump State Park is only a 15 minute drive from our home—last week my wife and I made a visit to the French Hill section of the park, making sure we did so right after a rainstorm so it would be as awful as possible. We were not disappointed. It was a good thing we had worn sturdy shoes, as we had to step over muddy spots in the main trail several times. Of course there were no toilets and not even any trash cans, although strangely there were some picnic tables, but no picnickers.

In fact the only other person we saw was a lone man standing on a side trail, juggling three orange balls, like something out of a Fellini movie.

It turns out that the French Hill section of the park (the other parcel is called Indian Hill) has a fascinating history. French soldiers, who had followed Lafayette to fight on the side of the American revolutionaries, had camped here, thus its name. Later, in the 19th century, it was an important farm in the area. See this excellent story by Michelle Young in Untapped New York for details.

In their press statements, the two New York legislators argued that the name should be changed because, as Levenberg’s release put it, “the park’s association with the former president is contributing to its neglect and sparse visitation.” Levenberg added, “I have received many unprompted messages from constituents who are dismayed at driving past signs for Donald J. Trump State Park.” And Holyman-Sigal is quoted as saying, “New York wants nothing to do with Donald Trump,” citing the January 6 insurrection among other crimes and misdemeanors.

Okay, well, here is the reveal: I call bullshit. I’m all in favor of changing the name of the park, but New York state can’t blame Donald J. Trump for its “neglect and sparse visitation.” That’s on the state officials, nearly all Democrats, who have done nothing to improve these 436 acres since the donation in 2006.

Moreover, amazingly, the proposed legislation does not actually change the name of the park. Rather, it directs the state parks commissioner to perform a study of whether it would be legal to change the name (obviously Trump might threaten to sue or take the land back, and he has already hinted at that) and it gives said park commissioner a full year to do the study! There are no suggestions in the bill about who the park should be named after if it does turn out to be legal.

I am not an attorney, although I worked for the ACLU for three years on a big lawsuit in the 1980s and I was the subject of an $18 million defamation suit more recently (don’t worry, it did not cost me a penny.) But I would bet I now have enough legal experience to figure out whether changing the name is legal with just a couple of hours’ time in a law library (or even online.) In other words, it should certainly not take a full year (and here’s hoping the state will not contract this out to some private law firm for hundreds of thousands of dollars, but who knows—worth watching.)

And if it turns out that it is not “legal” to change the name, and/or if Trump sues to either keep his name on the land or to take his donation back? (There are suggestions that he may have taken a $26.1 million tax deduction on the donation—ten times what he paid for the land—although we would need to check his tax returns from that period to be sure.) Will the state of New York continue to allow what could be “a beautiful park,” as Trump put, to remain an overgrown eyesore not even fit for walking dogs?

This does not look, to me, like a serious attempt to give the people of New York a nice park that is not named after a terrible man. It looks like an attempt by local Democrats to generate a little publicity and then hide behind some lawyer’s cowardly interpretation of the law to throw up their hands and say, we tried, but nothing can be done. That would continue to save the state the money it has not spent on the park every year since 2006, and provide a great excuse to keep on not spending that money.

Of course, this is just a bill and the state legislature has to approve it. Will they even do that? (Previous bills with similar intent have failed in the past; I should have mentioned that but I was trying to put a positive spin on things.)

If the bill does pass this time, let’s meet in this space a year from now and see what the legal eagles have decided. Maybe the people of New York and the Hudson Valley will get a great park one day. In the meantime, fortunately, there are plenty of others nearby.