The House Trump Bought That Nobody Else Wanted

There is a house in Palm Beach, Florida, with 58 bedrooms and 33 bathrooms. It cost $7 million to build in 1927 — over $100 million today. The woman who built it left it to the United States government. The government gave it back. Before that, she offered it to the State of Florida. Florida said no. She offered it to the Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian said no. When it finally went on the open market, three separate sales collapsed. Then a 39-year-old property developer from New York bought it for a fraction of what it had cost to build. Thirty-two years later he was President of the United States, working out of the house nobody else had wanted. *Sources* Smithsonian Magazine, "The Ironic History of Mar-a-Lago" NPR on the Post Foundation, the 1981 return and the "white elephant" problem WWD and Associated Press on the 1985 purchase and the 1995 club opening Palm Beach Post archive on the Secret Service and State Department objections