Why Donald Trump's Brother Never Got Out Of That House

Frederick Trump Jr. was born in 1938 in a house his father had built, in a part of Queens his father had developed, into a firm whose trading name already contained the word Son. He died in September 1981, aged 42, after moving back into his parents' house on Midland Parkway and going to work on one of his father's maintenance crews. Between those two points there is exactly one address that was not his father's. He qualified as a pilot, flew the Boston to Los Angeles route for Trans World Airlines, and rented a house in Marblehead, Massachusetts. It lasted about a year. It was during that year that his younger brother came up to visit and told him he was nothing but a glorified bus driver — a line Donald Trump himself described to a magazine journalist around 1990, thirty years before it appeared in any family memoir. When the flying ended he came back to Queens, to a flat in Highlander Hall on Highland Avenue — a 1958 building with a lobby by Morris Lapidus, developed by his father. According to his daughter's account, relayed by a national newspaper, he tried to buy a house of his own and could not get a mortgage. The two houses outlived him and did opposite things. 85-15 Wareham Place, where he lived between the ages of about seven and ten, has been sold five times, failed twice at auction, and was let on a holiday rental site at $725 a night. It sold again on 12 September 2026 for $1.93 million. For 85-14 Midland Parkway, the house he died out of, no sale price, date or buyer has ever been published. *Sources* New York Times, Jason Horowitz, "For Donald Trump, Lessons From a Brother's Suffering," 2 January 2016 Washington Post, 7 August 2019, on Donald Trump's regrets and the circumstances of his brother's death Marie Brenner, Vanity Fair, September 1990, and her account of that interview for PBS Frontline, "The Choice 2016" Mary L. Trump, Too Much and Never Enough, Simon & Schuster, 2020, and Who Could Ever Love You, 2024