Trump wanted to chop up and sell off Mar-a-Lago’s grounds in the ’90s. This is how preservationists and officials stopped him.

Trump wanted to chop up and sell off Mar-a-Lago’s grounds in the ’90s. This is how preservationists and officials stopped him.

Six years after Donald Trump swept into Palm Beach, Florida, to buy the sprawling 1920s mansion known as Mar-a-Lago, he filed paperwork to slice up its grounds, build eight huge houses, and sell them for a tidy profit. It was early 1991, a few months before Trump would file for bankruptcy for the first time with the in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He was attempting to restructure the casino's debt weighted down by millions in junk bonds. Mar-a-Lago was costing him more than $3 million in taxes and upkeep each year but not producing any income, a town official told the Palm Beach Daily News that year. Trump was looking for a way to make money from the property. "When he had all these problems with bankruptcies, this was the one thing he had of value, basically," Laurence Leamer, the author of "Mar-a-Lago: Inside the Gates of Power at Donald Trump's Presidential Palace," told Insider via phone last month. He added, "What was he going to do with it?" At the time, Mar-a-Lago was as beautiful . The centerpiece was a 62,000-square-foot structure, with a 75-foot tower, and pink-glazed tiles throughout. Builders had imported three boatloads of Italian stone for