Trump name finally gets dumped from Upper West Side apartment building at residents’ request
Photo via Nick Normal’s Flickr
In May, after a year of resistance from the Trump Organization, a judge ruled that an Upper West Side condo could have the president’s name expunged from the exterior of their 46-story building. Condo owners at 200 Riverside Boulevard voted to remove the bronze letters spelling “TRUMP” on the building, where they have hung for nearly two decades. Today they get their wish as their building joins three neighboring ones in dumping the Trump sign, the New York Times reports. Workers will remove the offending letters from the front and rear facades of 200 Riverside Boulevard; the building will become known merely by its address, like so many others in the city.
Residents at other Trump-monikered condominiums have expressed interest in taking similar action since Donald J. Trump entered the presidential fray, but parsing the licensing agreements with the Trump Organization and unifying residents’ opinion on the matter has been challenging.
200 Riverside, in the heart of the proudly liberal Upper West Side, managed to navigate the challenges. The building purchased the right to use the Trump name for $1 in 2000, when Trump himself signed a four-page agreement. But during Trump’s campaign, residents increasingly sought to distance themselves from the man and his politics. The name began to seem more irksome than luxurious. In a recent survey, the majority of building owners wanted the name removed.
After working out internal differences on the matter, the building’s condo board worked out a strategy with building lawyer Harry W. Lipman to ask the State Supreme Court for a declaratory judgment stating it was not required that they keep the Trump name under their licensing agreement, which did not mention such a requirement.
After the judge ruled in condo owners’ favor, lawyers for Trump company D.J.T. Holdings vowed to appeal the decision, but the October 1 deadline for appeals came and went with no action. The cost of removing the 20 letters from the building is about $23,000.
In 2015 there were 15 residential buildings with the Trump name. Three rental buildings near 200 Riverside Boulevard gave the name a “no” vote and had it scrubbed from their facades, lobby rain mats and employee uniforms after circulating a petition titled, “Dump the TRUMP Name” with 300 signatures, motivated by what one resident called “intense feelings about Trump himself. We would not have stayed in the building we felt so strongly about it. We just renewed our lease for two years.”
Slumping hotels in Toronto and New York paid the Trump Organization millions to be rid of the Trump name; The owner of a Panama Trump hotel pried the letters off with a crowbar. Manhattan’s Trump apartments sold for an average of $1,741 per square foot in Manhattan in 2017, or 6.6 percent less than the average Manhattan condominium, according to CityRealty.
[Via NYT]
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