The form of the city rises from the convergence of legislation, imagination, ambition, and resistance. This complex of forces is getting a workout a few blocks from my office in Lower Manhattan, where Donald Trump and partners are building the Trump SoHo, a 45-story “condominium hotel” containing 400 apartments—ranging in size from 425 to 10,000 square feet—priced at $3,000 a square foot and said to be selling briskly. The tower, which is going up fast and is scheduled to open in spring 2009, sits adjacent to SoHo and will be, by far, the tallest building in an area characterized by structures of six to 15 stories. Like most Trump projects, the architecture, by Handel Architects, is merely bland, another glass box. Because of its size, however, it whimsically rescales the entire neighborhood, permanently marring the low roofscape that stretches downtown and culminates in the Lower Manhattan skyline. It’s a view I take in every morning as I walk to work, and the new tower already constitutes an awful scar on the sky. As urbanism, it’s vandalism.
The controversy that surrounds the building, however, focuses on questions that exceed size. Use is the real issue: The hotel-condominium bifurcation is Trump’s strategy for building a residential structure in a neighborhood zoned for manufacturing, the last such district in Lower Manhattan. Although this zoning category does not permit residential structures, it does allow conventional hotels, which the code describes as facilities where units “are rented on a daily basis” and used “primarily for transient occupancy.” The condo hotel is a relatively new real estate product, introduced to New York in recent years and, to date, only in areas with residential zoning. It’s clear, though, that the zoning code was written well before any of its framers could possibly have imagined this particular bending of the idea of a “transient hotel.”
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