American Castle

July 3, 2023
Journalist Shanklin debuts with an immersive behind-the-scenes portrait of Mar-a-Lago, the former Palm Beach mansion turned private club. “An ode to Roaring Twenties excess,” the 17-acre “winter trophy estate” built by heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post (1887–1973) cost $3 million and took three years, from 1924 to 1927, to complete. When Post took the reins of the General Foods empire in 1936, becoming one of the first women to “command a global corporation,” she shuttered the mansion. Five years later, she turned it into a tourist attraction to “raise much-needed war funds.” After the war, Post relocated to Hillwood, her Washington, D.C., mansion, and none of her children took an interest in Mar-a-Lago. The National Park Service acquired it in 1973, but, daunted by the costs of upkeep, returned it to the Post Foundation after only a year. Current owner Donald Trump acquired the estate in 1986 for $10 million, turned it into a private club in 1994, and used it as the winter White House during his presidency; Shanklin concludes with the 2022 FBI raid to retrieve classified documents from the club. Chronicling 100 years of contentious real estate schemes and failed plots to put “this massive souvenir of the 1920s” to good use, Shanklin demonstrates that Mar-a-Lago has had an unusually variegated history, even compared to similar Gilded Age castles. Readers will be entertained. Photos.

July 15, 2023
A history of a grand mansion and its numerous occupants. In the 1920s, writes Shanklin, "across the Sunshine State, the steamy lure of tropical weather, flour-colored beaches, queen palms, orange trees, cheap land, and more cheap land drew hundreds of speculators." One structure sat on 17 acres behind a low rise that served as a buffer against the region's frequent hurricanes. That was an important consideration: In 1928, a hurricane "levied the ultimate regressive tax on its victims." Though the white citizens living in the mansions did fine, hundreds of Black workers brought in to build and maintain the new estates drowned and were either buried in mass graves or burned. Mar-a-Lago was relatively unscathed, though its owner, Marjorie Merriweather Post, complained that the winds had uprooted a number of palm trees. The property wasn't cheap, but Post wasn't concerned. The heiress to a fortune built on cereal, she had even more money at her disposal thanks to her marriage to financier E.F. Hutton. So wealthy were they that they went on a 10-week Caribbean cruise while the world staggered through the worst days of the Great Depression. Post eventually turned the keys over to the National Park Service under the aegis of Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, but NPS never had an adequate budget for the place. As such, it was returned to the Post Foundation in 1980 and, in 1986, sold to Donald Trump, who inflated its value and suckered Chase Manhattan Bank into floating 99.97% financing. When creditors suddenly called in $2 billion in notes, Trump developed it into a golf club with a historic easement that "could unlock a trove of tax breaks for Mar-a-Lago's owner." In a grifters' paradise, that seems fitting, though doubtless Post, a major donor to the Democratic Party, wouldn't be pleased with the current occupants. A well-told story that's full of surprises, its storied subject generating headlines for a century.

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