68 Is The New 58

How tall, exactly, is Trump Tower in New York City? Not as tall as The Donald says it is. From an article at the New York Times, dated November 1, 2016:

Though the tower was built with 58 floors, Mr. Trump later explained to The New York Times that because there was a soaring pink marble atrium and 19 commercial floors at the bottom, he could see no good reason not to list the first residential floor as the 30th floor. The pinnacle became the 68th — the height that appears in marketing materials, online search results and news articles to this day.

… As a review of his Manhattan building portfolio shows, Mr. Trump repeated his Trump Tower innovation at least seven more times.

The idea quickly caught on with other New York developers looking to sell condominiums of ever loftier height, status and, most important, price. By 1985, the year after Trump Tower opened, the developer Harry B. Macklowe had employed the same stratagem to turn his 67-story Metropolitan Tower into a 78-story skyscraper.

Mr. Macklowe’s team credited Mr. Trump for the idea. So did Mr. Trump.

“A lot of people have copied me,” he told The Times in 2003.

In this case, imitation is shrewd salesmanship. One57, the billionaires’ aerie on 57th Street that laid temporary claim to being the tallest residential tower in New York when it was completed in 2014, was said to top out at the $100 million 90th-floor penthouse. Actual floor count: 75.

“The higher your building, the better it is for your marketing purposes,” said Amir Korangy, the publisher of The Real Deal, a real estate publication based in New York. “Nobody’s trying to have the shortest building in the city, so any sort of edge you can get to add a floor here and there, you take it.”

The city’s Buildings Department does not object, so long as the floors are counted accurately in the building’s certificate of occupancy.

Hence the Trump SoHo on Spring Street, completed in 2010, where, according to the condominium offering plan filed with the state attorney general’s office, Mr. Trump skipped the 13th floor for superstition’s sake and a few more for marketing’s sake. There are 43 floors, but the elevators go up to 46.

Or take the Trump International Hotel and Tower, the hotel and residential building on Columbus Circle that was, pre-Trump, the 44-story Gulf & Western office building. Mr. Trump improved the structure so thoroughly that it managed to stretch into a 52-story tower, even though it stayed, strictly speaking, the same height.

Because new apartment buildings usually have lower ceilings than office buildings, Mr. Trump explained in 1994, the 583-foot building was about as tall as a conventional 60-story residential building.

Seen this way, measuring the converted tower at 52 floors was an act of altitudinal restraint.

“Depending on how you view it,” he said, “you could look at it as 60 stories.” (A spokeswoman for the Trump Organization did not respond to several requests for comment.)

Then there is the Trump World Tower on the East Side, built in 2001, which enraged antagonists as varied as Walter Cronkite (whose views it blocked) and the United Nations (whose height it dwarfed). At 90 stories and 900 feet — actually 70 and 843, according to Buildings Department records — the World Tower was once billed as the “tallest residential tower in the world,” until it was overtaken by a skyscraper in Dubai, prompting Mr. Trump to switch to a less easily fact-checked superlative: “most luxurious.”

Read the entire article here.