Trump Place buildings to go by 140, 160 and 180 Riverside Boulevard from now on

Three Trump Place buildings on the Upper West Side are changing their names to 140, 160 and 180 Riverside Boulevard this week, according to an email from landlord Equity Residential.

“The purpose of this change is to assume a neutral building identity that appeals to current and future tenants,” Equity Residential’s senior regional manager Mary Pawlisa wrote in an email to tenants, which was reviewed by The Real Deal. “Using The Street address for the building name is popular practice in NYC, and our well-known Riverside address makes it easy for visitors to locate the building.”

In October, residents at 160 Riverside Boulevard launched a petition to “dump the Trump name,” which quickly collected 241 signatures, according to a report.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether the three remaining Trump Place buildings, the condominiums at 120, 200 and 220 Riverside Boulevard, would also change their name. Residents at 220 Riverside had petitioned for a name change.

The name change highlights concerns that Donald Trump’s divisive political platform could impact his real estate brand. In October, the Trump Organization decided to drop the Trump name from a new line of hotels. </s> He’s fired — or at least his name is.

Three Upper West Side buildings that bear Trump’s name will soon be scrubbed of any trace of the president-elect, according to Equity Residential.

The company said that rental buildings at 140, 160 and 180 Riverside Blvd. will no longer be called “Trump Place.” Instead, they’ll be referred to by their street addresses.

“We are removing the [Trump] name on those buildings,” said Equity Residential spokesman Marty McKenna. “The decision was to brand the buildings with a more neutral building identity that will appeal to all current and future residents.”

The changes are already in motion, and everything that has the Trump name on it will be removed from the buildings.

“We took a number of issues under advisement, including input from residents,” McKenna said.

He added that the company had a contractual obligation to use Trump’s name, but that contract recently expired.

Residents at the buildings have pushed for the move for some time, and 600 people signed an online petition asking for the Trump name to be scrubbed.

“Just as celebrities have their endorsements rescinded for bad behavior, Equity Residential should rescind its leasing arrangement with Donald Trump, whose behavior has surely tarnished the Equity Residential brand,” the petition said. </s> WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Trump Place, the apartment complex that stands on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the New York City, is going to drop its name after residents raised an outcry to drop the president-elect's name from the tower.



About 600 tenants reportedly signed a 'Dump the Trump Name' petition to remove Trump signage from the buildings. There are about 1,325 apartments in the complex, according to the New York Times.



The three buildings-- at 140, 160 and 180 Riverside Blvd. will be renamed for their street addresses, said landlord Equity Residential, according to Bloomberg.



'We are assuming a more neutral building identity that will appeal to all current and future residents,' the Chicago-based company said.



'The building is beautiful, [and] the service is impeccable. But the name is very embarrassing. I'm embarrassed to tell people where I live. I tell them 180 Riverside Blvd,' Marjorie Jacobs, a resident in the buildings, told Bloomberg.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX </s> NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump’s name is being stripped off three luxury apartment buildings after hundreds of tenants signed a petition saying they were embarrassed to live in a place associated with the Republican president-elect.

In all, about 600 residents of the three rental towers in Trump Place signed the online petition, which began circulating weeks ago after the public release of a decade-old recording of Trump boasting about groping women and kissing them without their consent.

Tenants learned on Tuesday from the company that owns and manages the New York skyscrapers, which hold 1,325 rental apartments, that the huge gold letters spelling out “Trump Place” would be removed from the sides of the buildings within days.

“We’re all very excited and thrilled, and it’s about time,” said Marjorie Jacobs, who has lived in one of the buildings for five years. “We’re disgusted with the results of the presidency.”

A spokeswoman for Trump’s transition team, Hope Hicks, didn’t immediately return a request for comment on Tuesday. She told The New York Times in October that removing the Trump name would cause a building to “lose tremendous value.”

A spokesman for Equity Residential, the Chicago-based company that owns and manages the buildings, said its executives considered “the input of our residents” among other factors when making the decision to change the buildings’ names. Spokesman Marty McKenna said in an email that a “neutral building identity” might hold more appeal to current and future residents.

The letters spelling out Trump’s name could come down as soon as Wednesday, residents said. They will be replaced with the buildings’ addresses.

Several neighboring towers that also bear the Trump Place name but have different owners are sticking with the Trump brand.

In the early 1990s, Trump partnered with Chinese investors to develop a large area of land near Lincoln Center and the Hudson River on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. When Trump’s partners decided to sell the development in 2005 for $1.76 billion, he sued, arguing the price was too low.

Trump lost that litigation and remained a minority partner. His Trump Organization still manages some buildings in the development.

Brian Dumont, a wealth manager who has lived in his Trump Place apartment for four years, said the petition drive gained momentum after neighbors became increasingly embarrassed explaining to fellow New Yorkers that they lived in Trump buildings.

“You know how it is in New York, everyone asks you where you live,” he said. “And we found ourselves just recoiling.”

Voters in Manhattan resoundingly rejected Trump on Election Day. His main rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton, pulled in more than a half-million votes, compared with fewer than 60,000 for him.

Trump, asked whether his comments on the campaign trail had hurt his brand, said in an interview on Sunday, “Who cares?”

“This is big-league stuff,” he said on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” ”I don’t care about hotel occupancy. It’s peanuts compared to what we’re doing. Health care, making people better.” </s> Donald Trump won the election, but he's losing the Trump name that adorned three glitzy New York high rises.

Three Trump Place rental apartment buildings along the Hudson River are being renamed with just their street addresses -- 140, 160 and 180 Riverside Blvd. The "Trump Place" signs were removed from the buildings on Wednesday. The Trump Organization sold the buildings more than a decade ago.

Residents stood outside and watched the giant gold letters come down on Wednesday.

"This sign never really meant anything to me from the day I signed my first lease," said 10-year resident Aaron Bollman. "Obviously, the Trump name has a much different meaning to me now. I was really hoping he would lose and he would just go away, but that's not the case."

Bollman said he supported the decision to remove the name, that he thought he would make some of the residents feel better about the election results.

The buildings were purchased in 2005 by Equity Residential (EQR), a Chicago-based real estate company.

"Once Mr. Trump made the decision he was going to enter the political scene, we looked at it and said, 'We just want to be neutral. We don't want to have an opinion,'" Sam Zell, the company's chairman, told CNBC Wednesday.

He said that he first talked to Trump a year ago about removing the name, but that Equity had to wait until a deal to use the Trump name expired. He denied that the name was removed in response to a petition by building residents, or that Equity was worried about attracting protesters.

"He's going to be the president of the United States," Zell said. "That's a pretty damn good brand."

Related: Trump hotel not worth the trouble for wedding planners, travel agents

Building resident Linda Gottlieb started a petition to take down the Trump signs, along with her husband and a neighbor, three weeks before the election. "It's a small victory but it feels good," she said. "But how can anything take the sting out of the horror we're in?"

She added that "it doesn't get bluer than the Upper West Side of Manhattan."

The three buildings have about 1,300 apartments between them, and rents range from about $2,600 a month for a studio to $12,500 a month for a penthouse, according to the New York real estate site StreetEasy.com.

Three other buildings in the complex, which are condominiums rather than rental apartments, will keep the Trump Place name. They are still managed by the Trump Organization.

Related: What Donald Trump's campaign controversies mean for Ivanka

The apartment buildings were built by Trump starting in the 1990s in former railroad yards along the Hudson River. They have a view of both the river and Riverside Park. Gottlieb said she never thought much about the name when she moved in four years ago, but became more upset as the campaign wore on. She said the building owners were very responsive when she came to them last month with the proposal to change the name. </s> In the liberal stronghold of New York City, residents distraught over the incoming Republican administration were finding solace a week after the U.S. presidential election by placing handwritten, anonymous notes on the walls of a busy subway station.

On Tuesday, many notes offered support to immigrants or mocked Trump's promise to build a wall along the United States-Mexico border and have Mexico pay for it.

"This is the wall that love can build," read another.

Titled "Subway Therapy," the installation lining the underground walls beneath Manhattan's Union Square was the idea of artist Matthew "Levee" Chavez.

"The last couple days have been stressful and I wanted to provide people with an opportunity to engage in a small and easy way," he wrote in the magazine Quartz.

Anyone can post a note, and more than 10,000 people have, Chavez wrote on Instagram.

Democrat Hillary Clinton bested Trump 79 percent to 18 percent in New York City.

Writers of the sticky notes took varied approaches. Some pledged political action, saying "Vote in 2018" and "I will do my part to change this!"

A blue sticky note quotes novelist Zadie Smith on the subject of despair, and a pink one quotes Jesus' Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."

New York's Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, struck a pro-immigrant message, posting a note with lines from the Emma Lazarus poem that appear on the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free... I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

The defiant stance expressed in the notes is the right message for New Yorkers to send, said waitress Caitlin Cherry, 28, as she paused to look at them.

"I'm happy that people who are visiting can see that not all Americans want this," she said.

In a separate sign of protest, three apartment buildings on Manhattan's Upper West Side are dropping the name Trump Place and will be known by their addresses, the trade publication Real Deal reported, citing an email to tenants from landlord Equity Residential. Some tenants had circulated a petition requesting the change. </s> The Trump Tower apartment where a four-alarm fire killed a 67-year-old art dealer on Saturday did not have a smoke detector, FDNY officials have said.

No working alarm has been found in Todd Brassner's apartment, and New York City's fire department learned of the fire because of detectors in the building's heating and ventilation system, NBC News reported.

The city requires both property owners and tenants to ensure the installation and maintenance of smoke and carbon monoxide detectors.

When an apartment is sold the building owners are supposed to make sure a smoke detector is in the unit but residents are responsible for maintaining them after they buy it.

The 50th-floor apartment in the Manhattan high-rise did not have sprinklers either.

As previously reported, president Donald Trump fought against a 1998 law that said sprinklers needed to be installed in all residential buildings in New York City.

The legislation was proposed after two major fatal fires in Brooklyn and Manhattan - which sparked building code changes across the city.

And early talks for the bill said all buildings would be required to pay to install sprinklers, at the displeasure of many real estate moguls, including Trump.

After the bills were compiled Trump called city officials and made the argument that installing sprinkler systems throughout entire buildings was too expensive, the New York Times reported at the time.

The cost of the installation is roughly $4 per square foot.

Then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani agreed with developers, saying the cost of installing sprinklers was going to be too high.

After the proposal was tweaked to say existing buildings and those with approved permits didn't have to install sprinkler systems - Trump backed off and left the city council alone.

Giuliani signed the bill, which added the provision that if the high-rise rentals underwent renovations developers would have to install sprinklers.

The bill as it was initially written would have impacted two of his buildings, Trump Tower and Trump World Tower, which had already been approved but began construction in 1999.

He ended up spending $3million on sprinklers for the Trump World Tower, but they were never installed in the Upper East Side Fifth Avenue building.

On Sunday, New York City Council's Housing and Buildings Committee says it plans to push for laws to require residential high-rises to have fire sprinklers.

Authorities are still working to determine the cause of the fire, which reportedly started in Brassner's bedroom and appears like an accident.

The commissioner of the New York Fire Department said that the building stood up well despite not having sprinklers in the units.

The president later echoed that sentiment in a tweet, applauding firefighters for putting out the flames quickly.

'Fire at Trump Tower is out,' he wrote.

'Very confined (well built building). Firemen (and women) did a great job. THANK YOU!'

He did not mention the potential victims in his tweet.

This is reportedly the second fire this year at Trump Tower. In January a roof top fire broke out in the heating and cooling unit of the building. </s> NEW YORK (AP) — A raging fire that tore through a 50th-floor apartment at Trump Tower killed a man inside and sent flames and thick, black smoke pouring from windows of the president’s namesake skyscraper.

New York Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said the cause of Saturday’s blaze is not yet known but the apartment was “virtually entirely on fire” when firefighters arrived after 5:30 p.m.

“It was a very difficult fire, as you can imagine,” Nigro told reporters outside the building in midtown Manhattan. “The apartment is quite large.”

Todd Brassner, 67, who was in the apartment, was taken to a hospital and died a short time later, the New York Police Department said. Property records obtained by The Associated Press indicate Brassner was an art dealer who had purchased his unit in 1996.

Officials said four firefighters also suffered minor injuries. An investigation is ongoing.

Shortly after news of the fire broke, President Donald Trump, who was in Washington, tweeted: “Fire at Trump Tower is out. Very confined (well built building). Firemen (and women) did a great job. THANK YOU!”

Asked if that assessment was accurate, Nigro said, “It’s a well-built building. The upper floors, the residence floors, are not sprinklered.”

Fire sprinklers were not required in New York City high-rises when Trump Tower was completed in 1983. Subsequent updates to the building code required commercial skyscrapers to install the sprinklers retroactively, but owners of older residential high-rises are not required to install sprinklers unless the building undergoes major renovations.

Some fire-safety advocates pushed for a requirement that older apartment buildings be retrofitted with sprinklers when New York City passed a law requiring them in new residential highrises in 1999, but officials in the administration of then-mayor Rudy Giuliani said that would be too expensive.

Nigro noted that no member of the Trump family was in the 664-foot tower Saturday.

Trump’s family has an apartment on the top floors of the 58-story building, but he has spent little time in New York since taking office. The headquarters of the Trump Organization is on the 26th floor.

Nigro said firefighters and Secret Service members checked on the condition of Trump’s apartment. About 200 firefighters and emergency medical service workers responded to the fire, he said.

Some residents said they didn’t get any notification from building management to evacuate.

Lalitha Masson, a 76-year-old resident, called it “a very, very terrifying experience.”

Masson told The New York Times that she did not receive any announcement about leaving and that when she called the front desk no one answered.

“When I saw the television, I thought we were finished,” said Masson, who lives on the 36th floor with her husband, Narinder, who is 79 and has Parkinson’s disease.

She said she started praying because she felt it was the end.

“I called my oldest son and said goodbye to him because the way it looked everything was falling out of the window, and it reminded me of 9/11,” Masson said.

Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. </s> The man who was killed when a raging fire broke out in his apartment on the 50th floor of Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan early Saturday evening has been identified as a Westchester native.

The blaze, which was upgraded from three alarms to four alarms, erupted at the 58-story, 664-foot high mixed-use skyscraper on Fifth Avenue near West 56th Street just before 6 p.m.

Firefighters found the man, identified as 67-year-old Todd Brassner, unconscious and unresponsive when they entered the apartment.

"The apartment was entirely on fire," FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro said. "Members pushed in heroically, they were knocking down the fire and found one occupant of the apartment who is in critical condition."

Brassner was transported in critical condition to Mount Sinai St. Luke’s Hospital, where he died a short time later.

Four of the approximately 200 firefighters who responded suffered non-life threatening injuries, the FDNY said.

FDNY members remained at the scene after the fire was knocked down, searching floors and assessing smoke conditions. The cause of the fire remains under investigation.

"This was a very difficult fire," Nigro reported. "As you can imagine, the apartment is quite large, we are 50 stories up. The rest of the building had a considerable amount of smoke."

Brassner, an art dealer who purchased his high-rise apartment in 1996, had been struggling financially, the New York Post reported.

Brassner was a 1969 graduate of the New Rochelle Academy, a private school that closed in 1987.

"Fire at Trump Tower is out," President Donald Trump tweeted. "Very confined (well built building). Firemen (and women) did a great job. THANK YOU!"

"Thank you to the amazing men and women of the NYFD who extinguished a fire in a residential apartment at @TrumpTower," tweeted Trump's son, Eric, who lives at the family's Seven Springs Estate in Bedford. "The @FDNY and @NYPD are truly some of the most incredible people anywhere!"

The building houses the $100 million penthouse condominium residence of the building's namesake and developer, President Trump.

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Three Trump Place buildings on New York City's Upper West Side are each changing its name to their street addresses in response to a residents' petition, and to assume a neutral building identity, according to the landlord Equity Residential's spokesperson.