But the current disruption in the restaurant industry, for all the pain and economic loss it’s caused, provides an opening to disrupt the established models, and reckon with both the decline of hospitality and the reality of restaurant inequality. To recover and thrive in the years ahead, this essential American business will need to bring its time-honored cultural traditions into greater alignment with the social movements that define our times.

To start with, consider the slew of new options to purchase commercially prepared food that have flooded the marketplace in the last year. These options include delivery platforms, meal subscriptions, and online storefronts with offsite “ghost kitchens.” Takeout and delivery sales have skyrocketed, as have lines at the local drive-thru. Clearly, those who can afford to eat out occasionally are still buying and consuming food that they do not make themselves.

A shadowy army of workers has sprung up to staff these operations. Many are precariously employed, armed with some combination of a vehicle, a mobile app, a mask, and hand sanitizer. By connecting people to food through wordless hand-offs or drop-offs of plastic-wrapped edibles, these people are doing the human labor that Silicon Valley would rather automate than improve.

It’s paying work, but we should be alarmed by this trend, which represents the decline of hospitality.

Hospitality is not only about restaurants. It reaches into nail salons, spas, and hotels; it is the beating heart of the tourism trade. For customers, hospitality can be an immersive consumptive experience, the ineffable pleasure of a well-earned night out or trip away. For workers, hospitality is a form of interactive labor that requires subtle interpersonal skills. Hospitality is about customer service, which means that it is about affective and aesthetic forms of labor: the careful use of one’s emotions and bodily appearance to create a desired experience for others.

Precisely because hospitality is an infinitely more textured and sensory-rich experience when it is in-person rather than in a virtual environment, settings of hospitality are uniquely vulnerable to retreats in public life, be they from contagious viruses or new technologies.

While it may be easy for some observers to dismiss hospitality as “non-essential,” this overlooks just how deeply embedded hospitality is in our culture as well as our economy. Hospitality imbues otherwise ordinary activities (think: eating, resting, relaxing, going somewhere new) with special value and collective ritual. In restaurants, it elevates food consumption to the level of romance, laughter, discovery, scenery, identity, and status. We may not like everything that gets packaged together in restaurants, but picking restaurants apart and putting their constitutive parts back together as delivery handoffs and “ghost” kitchens sucks the life out of these operations.

When restaurants are allowed to re-open in full again, however, they will have to do far more than restore hospitality. They—and the larger society—will have to reckon with an issue long left to simmer on the back burner: social inequality within restaurants.

Even in the best of times, restaurants have been engines for social division and hierarchy in our society. These inequalities go beyond the well-known distinction between server and served—that is, those who have the resources to inhabit restaurants for leisure versus those who are compelled to be there for labor.

Less visibly, restaurants produce and reproduce social hierarchies of race and class within their workforces. As I explore in my recent book, Front of the House, Back of the House: Race and Inequality in the Lives of Restaurant Workers, everyday forms of inequality get threaded into the very fabric of restaurants. Particularly in higher-end establishments, class-privileged, white men and women get channeled into front-of-house and managerial jobs while working-class people of color, especially foreign-born Latino men, toil behind the scenes.

This social division of labor is the result of both management decisions and the worker inter-relations that bosses help to structure. Management sets the stage for this dynamic in restaurants through discriminatory hiring and supervisory strategies. Workers then play out the scenes each and every day, coming to understand their colleagues as members of distinctly unequal “teams” tinged with race, class, and gender differences.

As a cruel irony, these inequities will get more pronounced, not less, as restaurants return to full operations (as I hope that they do again very soon). This is because serving more customers means very different things for different groups of workers. For those in the front of the house, a busy shift means more cash tips; for those in the back of the house, a busy shift means more sweat. Tips thus function as racialized and classed forms of income because they flow primarily to front-of-house workers who are often young, white, and highly educated and stop short of the Brown and Black workers in the kitchen. Under the hood of hospitality, the reproduction of social inequality feels—and looks—like business as usual.

Restaurateurs, given their numbers and all the lives they touch, could play an outsized role in bringing about organization and industry-wide innovation along these lines. The question they will need to address is, how can their establishments become more equitable spaces of employment while still managing to fill seats and pay bills? Upholding the exploitative and racially unequal norms of the past may become increasingly bad business, especially in an era when social-media savvy diners have trained their attention on these topics.

Using this moment to figuratively “turn the tables” on restaurant practices could represent a boon to business rather than an undue burden. This involves rethinking unspoken industry practices in order to widen the pool of people that find stepping foot in restaurants to be a rewarding experience. Because hospitality is about enacting finely crafted relationships with guests, the behind-the-scenes craftwork that goes into this should be made transparent to both customers and workers. The swift and silent busser, the jack-of-all-trades line cook, the bar back who is a master of anticipating needs; these workers invest daily in the production of hospitality. It is time for their employers to celebrate them in meaningful ways, such as by recognizing workers publicly while also expanding their training and advancement opportunities, or by soliciting worker input on best practices and providing these individuals with a pathway to acquiring a stake in ownership (or at least a cut of recent business successes they helped achieve).

Restaurant management should communicate these efforts proudly to members of the public as a selling point. Helping create a more inclusive workforce channels our moment in history in the most positive way possible, connect conversations in the community with conversations around dining tables—and among those walking the floor and working the grills, too. As we have seen from the rise of social and political protest in the sports world, restaurants could look to partner with foundational movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo in their efforts to empower workers of color and women and propel them into prominent roles within the industry. Restaurants are still businesses, and businesses must make money in order to survive. But they can and should do so as value-driven brands—third spaces for a new era—that tap the cultural milieu and refract it back outwards in the form of concrete practices.

Customers need to be able to support restaurants that make these concerted efforts. A worker advocacy center called Restaurant Opportunity Coalition United (ROCU) has launched an app call ROC National Diners’ Guide aimed at bringing consumer awareness to restaurants that are practicing “high road” employment standards, such as by offering livable wages, racial equity, and opportunities for advancement. The app’s interface is designed like Yelp, the widely used restaurant review app, except with a rating system for employment standards and a corresponding map of restaurants in the area (though it has limited coverage).

The Diner’s Guide is but one of a growing number of efforts to realize change in an industry that is at a crossroads. The road forward is to make going to a restaurant to be an act of supporting a new movement to infuse our dining experience with both expertly crafted hospitality and concerted efforts to advance social justice.

If we build such a movement, restaurants should thrive again in the post-pandemic era—as the engines of opportunity, not inequality.

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But the country’s remarkable run could be stymied if businesses can’t figure out ways to stoke productivity anew, said The Economist political editor Adrian Wooldridge during “How Has America Survived Two Centuries of Capitalism?” a Zócalo/KCRW “Critical Thinking with Warren Olney” event at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in downtown Los Angeles.

Wooldridge, a historian and journalist who has worked for the The Economist in Washington and in Los Angeles, today writes the Bagehot column, which focuses on British life and politics. He’s written or co-written 10 books, including 2018’s Capitalism in America: A History, a collaboration with former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan.

Before an overflow audience, Wooldridge told Olney, host of KCRW’s “To The Point,” that he began with a “thought experiment.” What if the world’s most important people in 1690 had gathered for their own Davos and asked themselves, “Who will dominate the world?”

Back then, in the late 17th century, China would have had a good case in its favor, Wooldridge argued, as might have Turkey, Spain, and even Britain. “But nobody in this imaginary conversation would ever mention the United States. It was an afterthought … it just didn’t matter that much,” he noted.

Today it’s a different story. The U.S.’s 5 percent of the world’s population produces 25 percent of the world’s GDP. America has the most forward-looking industries and the largest concentration of great universities.

“The rise of the U.S. in the last four centuries is the most important story of the last four centuries,” Wooldridge said.

Wooldridge pointed to several factors that made this unexpected economic dominance possible. Crucially, he said, Americans are better than most at “creative destruction,” a term coined by the German economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1942 to refer to the “relentless process of shifting activity to create more productive environments … going from horse buggies to automobiles, and from iron to steel.”

It’s a difficult process, he said, but Americans have excelled at it. In their book, Wooldridge and Greenspan credit this to the sheer size of the country, which makes it easier for people to move from place to place, abandoning old systems and institutions, for maximum economic gain.

“Britain is a small country, you tend to be conservative about moving people,” Wooldridge told the Zócalo audience. “Americans are careless, they uproot. You get the Rust Belt decaying and the Sun Belt rising.”

America is also a new country, forged at a time when capitalism was on the rise. The Revolutionary War took place the year after the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Wooldridge noted. The U.S. was not shackled by old aristocratic ideas.

America’s constitution, too, made it nimbler, preventing the rise of a “massive and interventionist state” that might get in the way of innovation.

The moderator Olney asked Wooldridge about American entrepreneurs of the late 19th century—the “Robber Barons”—who Wooldridge and Greenspan call the “Titans”.

Wooldridge said that American entrepreneurs like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford were key drivers of American success, because they had “imperialism of the soul”—a desire to create boundless business empires.

Their ascendance a century ago—and our era’s rise of Silicon Valley leaders like Steve Jobs and even Mark Zuckerberg—is uniquely American, he argued. “If you’re French you want to sit in a café. If you’re British you want land and horses. If you’re German you want to be a scholar. If you’re American, you want to be an entrepreneur.”

These Titans, of both the industrial and information ages, amassed power by forming huge corporations, which provided a competitive advantage for the U.S., Wooldridge said. There were times when the Titans’ projects caused pain for workers—driving smaller competitors out of business, eliminating jobs and depressing wages—but Americans have usually bounced back.

Whether they’ll be able to do so again may be another story, Wooldridge added. A big question is whether the U.S. can restore productivity growth that it has lost, especially in the decade since the Financial Crisis of 2008.

When Olney suggested that Wooldridge was exploring how to “Make America Great Again,” the audience laughed. But Wooldridge agreed, noting that economic “stagnation is what lies behind a lot of America’s problems,” including weak wage growth, slower company creation, and economic inactivity.

“Is America past its peak?” he asked rhetorically, and suggested that the answer is no: that it was bad economic policies, rather than bad fundamentals, that were holding back growth. “We’re in an iron cage of our own making—all we need to do is turn the key and we get out of it.”

Audience members wanted to know how better antitrust laws might promote innovation (Wooldridge said research into the matter had been launched by the Obama White House but had since been stopped), and what slavery had to do American capitalism’s triumph. His answer: plenty. Slavery is “obviously an appalling stain on America,” Wooldridge said, that created “a lot of money for a lot of people.”

The conversation shifted briefly to Europe. Olney asked: “What about Brexit? What the hell is going on?”

“I have no idea,” Wooldridge said, suggesting that if the separation from the European Union was again presented to British voters in a referendum, “it will tear the country apart. There will be riots in the street. It would be appalling for democracy.”

“But I’m in favor of it,” he wryly noted, as the least terrible option.

Asked by an audience member about France’s yellow vest protesters, Wooldridge criticized President Emmanuel Macron’s approach to worker protests as “insensitive”—and saw a lesson that applies in the U.S. and the U.K. as well.

“I think one of the big dynamics we have in the world right now is a sort of wall—a metaphorical wall—between the skilled elite and everyone else. It creates a lot of tension. We need the cognitive elite to be less arrogant and supercilious.”

And if the middle class is “hollowed out” by technology’s newest wave of innovation, he said, things could get a whole lot worse. But higher corporate taxes won’t fix that. “I don’t think it addresses the problem of productivity,” he said. “There are other things we need to do.”

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And while you may not know it, the American government has long put a price tag on Americans themselves. The Obama administration pegged the value of the average American life at $9.1 million. That was up from $6.8 million under the Bush administration.

Americans have developed the penchant for measuring nearly every aspect of their lives in dollars and cents, a process of seeing humans as assets that is so deeply ingrained in American life and decision-making that it constitutes a national philosophy.

Consider the price tags that Americans place on nature. According to “willingness to pay” surveys, dog owners will shell out $7,000 more than cat owners to save their pets, while Americans would pay $257 to save the bald eagle from extinction and $208 to save the humpback whale. (That may sound noble but should be compared to the survey finding that Americans would pay $225 to drop ten pounds.) Think the purple mountain majesties of a Yosemite or a Yellowstone are priceless? Think again. The total economic value of the National Park Service was recently estimated at $92 billion.

Finally, there is the planet itself: Americans are willing to pay $177 a year to avoid climate change and save the world. That’s about 75 percent more than what they pay for cable TV per month.

Reward notice for bilingual runaway slave, Oppenheim, New York, 1824. Image courtesy of the New York Public Library Digital Collections.

What is the impetus behind such calculations? The short answer: cost-benefit analysis. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan passed executive order 12,291, which mandated cost-benefit analysis for all major environmental and health-and-safety regulations. Many of the above examples were the product of such analyses. But if you look back further—before the Reagan era—to the mid-19th century, you ‘ll find that the pricing of everyday life has long been an American pastime. Go back even further, to the 18th century, and you will uncover some of the deep—and disturbing—origins of this American penchant to price everything and everyone.

In 1830, for example, the New York State Temperance Society measured the social damage produced by excessive drinking by pricing the overall cost to the city. “There cannot be a doubt,” the society concluded after a series of in-depth calculations, “that the city suffers a dead yearly loss of three hundred thousand dollars” due to “time spent drinking,” “drunkenness and strength diminished by it,” “expenses of criminal persecutions,” and “loss to the public by carelessness.” An 1856 article titled “The Money or Commercial Value of Man” in Hunt’s Merchants Magazine—the first national business magazine in America—valued the education of New York children at a profit of $500 million to the country.

In 1910, an article in The New York Times headlined “What the Baby is Worth as a National Asset” utilized Yale economist Irving Fisher’s money valuation of human beings to deduce that “an eight pound baby is worth, at birth, $362 a pound.” By 1913, as eugenics became the rage, the National Committee for Mental Hygiene asserted that the insane were “responsible for loss of $135,000,000 a year to the nation.”

Such acts of social pricing, while rare in the early 19th century, were ubiquitous by the early 20th. The common thread running through these examples is that the men (and they were nearly all men) who made these calculations were imagining American society as a capitalized investment and its inhabitants as income-generating units of human capital.

Aspects of everyday life such as education, mental health, or alcohol consumption could only be given price tags if one treated American society and its residents as a series of moneymaking assets, thus measuring their value in accordance to their ability (or, in the case of hungover employees surfing the net, their inability) to generate monetary income. This uniquely capitalist way of conceiving of the world, which I have called “investmentality,” was already poignantly on display in that 1856 Hunt’s Merchants Magazine article which priced the value of a child’s education.

“The brain is … an agricultural product of great commercial investment,” noted the author, and the “greatest problem of political economy” was how to “produce the best brain and render it most profitable.”

Today, as the term “human capital” crops up everywhere and countless self-help experts encourage Americans to become more productive by “investing in yourself,” an investmentality has achieved the status of common sense.

The investmentality that sparked the pricing of everyday American life emerged out of the rise of American capitalism. The key element that separates capitalism from previous forms of economic organization is not market exchange or monetary spending (those have been around for thousands of years) but rather widespread capital investment. Such investments are acts through which various aspects of everyday life—be they natural resources, industrial factories, cultural productions, or technological inventions—are reconceived as income-generating assets and valued as such. As capital flowed into various investment channels across the United States in the 19th century, distinctly capitalist quantification techniques escaped the confines of the business world and seeped into every nook and cranny of society.

Like capitalism itself, the pricing of everyday life is not an exclusively American phenomenon. Similar examples of investmentality and social monetization first appeared in 17th-century England and can now be found across the globe. What distinguishes America is the enthusiasm with which our elites embraced money measures. As early as the 1830s, Alexis de Toqueville recognized that “as one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?”

There are various reasons why the United States embraced the pricing of everyday life more than other nations—including the long-standing American tendency to leave much of the responsibility for the allocation of resources, cultural production and economic development in the hands of private capitalists rather than public states.

Yet one reason demands a few final words: American slavery. The “chattel principle” and the rise of an economic institution in which human beings were actually bought and sold helped to jumpstart, legitimize, and normalize the pricing of everyday life. On the rare occasions when early Americans did seek to evaluate social developments in monetary values, slaves served as their main source of both inspiration and data.

The earliest instances of the pricing of everyday American life I discovered in my research were from South Carolina in the 1710s—the colony with the highest proportion of slaves and the most capital invested (especially in large rice plantations). By the 1740s, South Carolina Governor and slaveholding planter James Glen anticipated the invention of Gross Domestic Product two centuries later by calculating the income generating “value” of all inhabitants of the colony at £40,000 a year.

Up north, similar developments were afoot. In 1731, Benjamin Franklin priced the social cost of a smallpox epidemic in Philadelphia by calculating each loss of life at £30 because that was the going price of slaves in the city. He was not alone. “Calculating the value of each person, in a pecuniary view, only at the price of a negro,” the newspaper called the Weekly Magazine estimated the monetized worth of all Americans as “equal to nearly one hundred million sterling” in the 1790s.

It was, in short, often the institution of slavery that set important historical precedents by first enabling early Americans to price the residents of their young nation, be they free or enslaved. By the mid-19th century—following a half-century in which southern investment in human bodies (alongside northern investment in real estate, railroads, and factories) had fanned the flames of American investmentality—slavery finally came to an end. The pricing of everyday life, however, was just taking off.

 
*An earlier version of this essay stated: “Americans are willing to pay $177 a year to avoid climate change and save the world. That’s about 75 percent more than what they pay for cable TV.” It should have indicated that the cable TV amount is per month, not per year.

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The four most prominent characteristics of the Trump penthouse—its phenomenal size, ornamental gaudiness, aping of the European royalty and affinity with classical European artistic traditions, and public conspicuousness—are also how earlier generations of upper-class New Yorkers used their homes to display their wealth and power and convey their distinction. This pattern was at its height during the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, during the reign of famous uber-capitalists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, with whom Trump seems to identify. Prior to the late 19th century, the houses of elite New Yorkers were decidedly more modest than they became in the Gilded Age; afterwards, the wealthy generally chose to shield their residences from public scrutiny and their tastes shifted away from the classical and neo-classical.

Among the handful of upper-class homes built in Manhattan during the colonial period that survive today is the Morris-Jumel Mansion in the present-day Washington Heights section of the upper part of the island, which was constructed in 1765 as a country house for Roger and Mary Morris. Roger Morris had been a colonel in the British Army and was a member of the royal governor’s executive council; Mary Morris was the daughter of Frederick Philipse, one of the wealthiest men in New York colony. Their country estate covered 130 acres of woodlots, orchards, and pastures and offered sweeping views of both the Hudson and Harlem Rivers, lower Manhattan, and what is now the Bronx. The Morrises’ primary residence stood at the corner of Whitehall Street and Stone Street in lower Manhattan, close to the Bowling Green neighborhood that stood as the most exclusive enclave in the colonial city.

Another example of an upper-class New York City home from this same period was the six-room, two-story brick house where Abraham Lodge, a prosperous attorney, and his family resided during the 1750s. The Lodge mansion employed superior building materials such as brick and glass which had been previously unavailable in the colonies in either quantity or quality, and its interior boasted fine furnishings—many of them imported from Europe—that displayed the refinement and gentility of its owners.

Few images of the Morris country mansion appear to exist, but contemporaries remarked on its large size (for its time) and its elegant Palladian architecture. The Morrises were Tories who fled the United States following the American Revolution, and their country estate was seized under forfeiture laws and fell into disrepair. In 1810, the house was purchased by Stephen Jumel, a wealthy French merchant, and his wife Eliza, who remodeled it in the Federalist style that was then the height of architectural elegance, adding a columned portico and overhauling the interior. Today, it is a historic house museum.

By the 1830s, the city’s prime upper-class residential area was the Lafayette Place-Bond Street neighborhood in what is now Greenwich Village. As the economy of New York City took off after the War of 1812 and the merchants’ offices, warehouses, shops, and rooming house that were the products of this urban economic boom began to encroach on old elite neighborhoods (like Bowling Green) in lower Manhattan, upper-class New Yorkers relocated to new neighborhoods like Lafayette Place-Bond Street that were emerging on the periphery of the built-up area. There, merchants, lawyers, bankers, and physicians settled in newly fashionable row houses and mansions. In 1835, Seabury Tredwell, a prosperous hardware importer, and his wife Eliza bought a red brick and marble row house on a block of Fourth Street in the Lafayette Place-Bond Street enclave for $18,000 (which would be equal to $460,000 today). While many similar dwellings that went up in this vicinity before the Civil War were subsequently demolished or transformed beyond recognition, this house and its furnishings have been preserved almost completely intact because the youngest Tredwell daughter continued to live there until her death at age 93 in 1933. Three years later, the building became the site of what is now the Merchant’s House Museum.

Able to live well, if not as extravagantly as their nouveau riches neighbors the Astors and the Vanderbilts, the Tredwells made use of their city house (and their country estate in Rumson, New Jersey) to corroborate their wealth, prestige, and taste. The front and rear parlors that occupied most of its first floor had wooden Ionic columns and plaster moldings inspired by the fashionable Greek Revival design. New household technologies like the Tredwells’ modern bell system and cookstove became status symbols for elites.

In the late 1860s and the 1870s, upper-class residences resumed their progression up the east side of Manhattan. They were displaced from the pre-Civil War elite neighborhoods (like Lafayette Place-Bond Street) as retail shops, stables, warehouses, and middle- and working-class inhabitants overtook those areas, while also being pulled further uptown by the open space and larger lots available there. In the 1880s the finest upper-class neighborhood in the city was Murray Hill, which occupied a corridor that ran up Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue starting at around 23rd Street. Extravagant mansions occupied the corner lots in Murray Hill, including Alexander T. Stewart’s at Fifth Avenue and Broadway, Leonard Jerome’s at Madison and 26th Street, and Collis P. Huntington’s at 57th and Fifth Avenue. Stewart was an Irish-born entrepreneur who opened the first department store in the United States, the famed Marble Palace at 280 Broadway in New York City in 1848, and who went on to make a fortune from retailing; Jerome was a stock speculator as well as a sports aficionado who participated in yachting and thoroughbred horse racing; and Huntington was one of the promoters who constructed the Central Pacific portion of the first U.S. transcontinental railroad.

Many of the architects who built these Gilded Age mansions had trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and their designs mimicked Georgian town houses, Venetian palazzos, and French chateaus. Richard Morris Hunt created the mansion of William K. and Alva Vanderbilt at Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street in the style of a French Renaissance chateau. It was built primarily by craftsmen brought over from Europe, and decorated with stone and wood carvings, stained glass, and embroidered textiles imported from the continent. Even grander was the 130-room palace of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, which occupied an entire block front on the west side of Fifth Avenue from 57th Street to 58th Street, and to this day is the largest single-family house ever built in New York City. Seabury and Eliza Tredwell’s row house (which had 17 rooms and 7,100 square feet of inhabitable space) could fit inside this Vanderbilt colossus 10 or 12 times over.

By the end of the 19th century, New York City guidebooks were lavishing 10 or 15 pages apiece on Murray Hill, with some laying out stage coach or pedestrian tours that let tourists “pass miles of the most magnificent and costly residences in America.” They supplied the home addresses of grandees such as Cornelius Vanderbilt II, John Jacob Astor IV, and John D. Rockefeller, along with descriptions of their mansions that estimated their construction costs. Like tourist maps that show the location of the homes of celebrities in Los Angeles today, these guides encouraged visitors to gawk at the fairytale mansions in Murray Hill. With their showmanship, ostentation and huge expense, these mansions advertised the achievements of their robber baron owners.

Since the Gilded Age, the homes of upper-class New Yorkers have gone in divergent directions. Many elites became concerned about their privacy and security and either moved their primary residences out of the city altogether or lived in apartment buildings, like the River House, at 435 East 52nd Street. After World War I and World War II devastated European societies and brought about the political and financial eclipse of their hereditary peerages, the European aristocracy lost most of its allure for rich New Yorkers. While the stuffy European traditions and the over-the-top displays of ornamental splendor of the Gilded Age never entirely faded away, in the 1950s elite New Yorkers with fashionable tastes began to adopt a modernist aesthetic, and by the 1970s they preferred more vernacular styles as they went about gentrifying brownstone neighborhoods like Park Slope in Brooklyn and former industrial areas like Soho and Tribeca. For the most part, wealthy New Yorkers who were alert to contemporary design tastes and social values no longer modeled their residences on the palaces and manor houses of the European royalty; once au courant, those styles now seemed dull and passé. Donald J. Trump’s Manhattan high-rise home is a throwback to the time when the New York upper class was at the pinnacle of its power and wealth, and did not shrink from commanding others to do its bidding.

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