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What’s in a name? Residents of Trump Place petition for a change

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at the 71st Annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner Thursday, in New York.

NEW YORK >> At three large rental buildings emblazoned with gold letters spelling out T-R-U-M-P P-L-A-C-E on the Upper West Side, the lobby rain mats embossed with the same name are being replaced, tenants say. The new versions, they have been told, will proclaim the buildings’ addresses, 140, 160 or 180 Riverside Blvd.

At the same buildings, they say, the doormen and concierges have been measured for new uniforms that will no longer carry the Trump name.

And 300 people, most of them tenants, have signed an online petition titled “Dump the TRUMP Name” in less than 10 days.

Marjorie Jacobs, a retired teacher who lives at 180 Riverside Blvd., is one of them. “It’s embarrassing to tell people where you live,” Jacobs said. “His name does not need to be on the front of the building.”

Throughout his career, Donald Trump has bragged that his name increases the value of a property by “25 percent” and that apartments in his buildings command higher prices. He may be the only developer in the world whom rival developers will pay to put his name on their buildings.

But in a city where that name is splashed across Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, Trump International Hotel at Columbus Circle, Trump Soho, Trump World Tower, Trump Parc, Trump Plaza, Trump Wollman Rink in Central Park and the Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point in the Bronx, a backlash may be taking hold against the Republican presidential nominee.

It has gained special momentum on Riverside Boulevard, where a string of buildings carries Trump Place branding. There, Linda Gottlieb, a television and film producer who lives in a $9,700-a-month apartment at 140 Riverside Blvd., created the petition to get rid of Trump’s name.

A Democrat and a supporter of Hillary Clinton, Gottlieb had grown increasingly despondent about having the Trump name over her front door as the presidential race unfolded.

“For me,” she said, “watching Trump talk about groping women and then seeing his name above my home was the breaking point. It was time to declare that we don’t want to live in a building bearing his name, or a country suffering his presidency.”

Her building is part of a parcel between 72nd and 59th streets along the Hudson River that Trump developed with a group of Hong Kong billionaires starting in the 1990s. Seven of the buildings in the area were emblazoned with his name. But while some of the condominium towers in the development are still managed by the Trump Organization, the three rental buildings now belong to a company called Equity Residential, which also manages them.

Martin McKenna, Equity Residential’s vice president in charge of investor and public relations in Chicago, said the company had “a contractual obligation on the use of the name.” He declined to say how much longer the contract had to run, but added that, “we’re going to assess this when the obligation expires, taking into account concerns by the residents in their petition.”

Erin Kelly, also a resident of 140 Riverside Blvd., and a signatory to the petition, said that as her son and nanny were leaving the building on Sept. 27, the day of the first presidential debate, they noticed workmen measuring the rain mats and asked what was going on. A staff member told them new, Trumpless mats were being ordered.

“I haven’t had a single interaction with a neighbor or an employee who wasn’t interested in having the name removed,” Kelly said. “It used to be that we were embarrassed because he was tacky. Now he’s shown himself to be despicable on every level.”

Jacobs, of 180 Riverside, said one of the doormen and a concierge had told her uniforms without the Trump name were in the offing.

McKenna, of Equity Residential, said, “We don’t have a comment on that.”

Trump’s press secretary, Hope Hicks, said that he had not heard of the petition, but that it seemed like “an inappropriate thing to do.”

“If the name comes off, the building will lose tremendous value,” she said.

The newfound aversion to Trump’s name is not limited to the three buildings. Residents of 220 Riverside Blvd., a condominium in the same neighborhood also emblazoned with Trump Place, have circulated their own petition for removal of the name, though it is unclear that it has had any effect.

Last month, Trump Hotels announced that its new line of hotels aimed at millennials would not carry the name, but would instead be called Scion. In Vancouver, Canada, the mayor has asked the developer of the Trump International Hotel, which is scheduled to open next year, to change the hotel’s name. And in Washington, the newly opened Trump International Hotel has had trouble filling its 263 rooms, according to a report in New York Magazine.

Eric Danziger, the chief executive of Trump Hotels, did not respond to a request for comment.

The three Riverside Boulevard rentals have a combined total of 1,325 apartments, and the total number of petition signatories is still far less than a majority of tenants.

Standing outside 180 Riverside Blvd. on Thursday morning, Corey Cresenzi, 26, a financial adviser, had no problems with the name, which is what attracted him to the building in the first place, he said.

“They should leave it on,” said Cresenzi, who, unlike those who signed the petition, leans toward Trump in the presidential race. “It’s a rental building. If someone doesn’t like it, there are other buildings on Riverside Boulevard they can move to.”

If the buildings’ names were changed, it would not be the first time T-R-U-M-P letters have been excised from a Manhattan skyscraper. After buying the General Motors Building on Fifth Avenue, Trump added his name in tall gold letters to the previously discreet structure. In 2003, he was forced by his partner, Conseco, to remove it. Trump hired a crew to discard the letters in the dead of night when there would be few witnesses. But The Daily News was able to memorialize the event.

Brian Dumont, who runs his own financial services company and lives in 160 Riverside Blvd., helped Gottlieb circulate the petition and said he expected the number of signatories to grow once they finished putting a copy of the petition under each resident’s door.

Like many of those who signed, Vishal Misra, a Columbia University professor of computer science, and his wife, Shruti Pandey, had misgivings about Trump when they moved into the building. But the couple went ahead anyway so that their children would qualify for a local school.

Misra said his friends knew of his antipathy for Trump, adding that cabdrivers who often brought him home frequently teased him about the name over the front door.

Even before the petition began circulating, Misra wrote to Equity management, asking, “Is there any initiative to rename the building to something the residents aren’t embarrassed about?”

Management welcomed his “feedback,” he said, but said little else. There is one notable thing about the emails from Melissa Levix from Equity. Over the course of several exchanges, the address at the bottom of her notes changed to “160 Riverside” from “160 Trump Place.”

© 2016 The New York Times Company

8 responses to “What’s in a name? Residents of Trump Place petition for a change”

  1. klastri says:

    In yet another business miscalculation, Mr. Trump has successfully ruined his brand. Residents in buildings all over the country are now moving to have his name removed. Traffic and bookings in his hotels have collapsed to the point that yet another bankruptcy is forecast. His new hotel in Washington DC is now dramatically discounting room rates to less than half of the rack rates.

    People who can afford what he sells have grown to loathe Mr. Trump and people who support him can not afford what he sells.

    Great job, Mr. Trump!

    • justmyview371 says:

      Time to get cheap reservations?

      • klastri says:

        If you can actually stand to stay in a hotel with his name on it, the rooms at his hotel in DC are going for about 1/2 price.

        That kind of discounting is a death sentence for a hotel with a large debt.

        • sarge22 says:

          Michelle Obama’s Mom Will Get $160k For Life… Paid By Our Taxes

          This is the kind of graft and corruption that happens in places like Iraq and North Korea. Michelle Obama’s mom didn’t earn a pension that’s three times bigger than the average American family’s income.

          It seems that just like Barack, the rest of the Obama’s never had real jobs, and instead of live high on the hog off the backs of regular taxpaying Americans.

          Congress just announced the most outrageous waste of taxpayer money designed by Obama.

          First Grandma Marian Robinson, 79, will receive a lifetime 160K government pension when she leaves the White House next year, according to congressional budget statements.
          According to documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Mrs. Robinson earned the lifetime pension for “services rendered as full-time/in-home caregiver” for granddaughters Malia, 18, and Sasha, 15, during President Obama’s two terms in office.

          Michelle Obama’s mom got to live like a queen in the White House, but they are going to pay her $160,000 every year for the rest of her life for babysitting her own granddaughters?

        • klastri says:

          sarge22 – You are lying of course. Like you always do.

          This was a deliberately planted internet rumor that folks like you – naturally – picked up on. It’s not true. Mrs. Robinson was never a government employee and will not receive a pension. This has been thoroughly debunked and retracted.

          It might help if you would stop lying. Finally.

        • Ikefromeli says:

          Sarge, anyone with a 6th grade education would know that is a fake story. Oh well, you might be well served by repeating the grade…..

        • Cricket_Amos says:

          Boston Tribune Oct 25
          “According to documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Mrs Robinson earned the lifetime pension for services ….”

          If you Google the topic, there is link after link about this, but none that I saw in the first 5 pages that said it was a spoof.

          However, the Boston Tribune appears to be a fake news site with stories such as ( http://thebostontribune.com)
          – “31 individuals have been confirmed dead after a group of store owners within a Florida strip mall engaged in a deadly shootout with looters.”
          – “George Zimmerman has once again found himself under the watchful eye of the media after launching Z|12 Private Security, a private security and personal protection firm located in Florida.”

          I think that if Hillary wins, there will be headlines like the following that are similarly suspicious, but this time they will be real.
          – “new wage parity laws require average wage for women in a corporation to be the same as for men, independently of any differences in job category”
          – “medical care for seniors to be rationed, so that the number of procedures performed for their age group is the same as for other age groups”

          This inability to think outside of fabricated categories is Hillary’s disastrous flaw. It is why so many of the things that she does never turn out quite right. I do not think she is capable of improvement.

        • klastri says:

          Cricket_Amos – Why would you fabricate ridiculous things like the last two items? What’s the point of lying?

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