For the second time in four months, the name “Trump Place” will come down from a New York building’s facade after condominium owners at 120 Riverside Blvd. voted to have the name removed.
“Accordingly, arrangements are being made to have the ‘Trump Place’ signage removed from the building façade,” the email said. It was not clear when the sign would actually come down.
The decision follows a similar one by condo owners at 200 Riverside Blvd., a few blocks north, in October.
Both buildings sit on the former site of a rail yard on the Upper West Side that President Trump helped develop in the 1990s. The area was named Trump Place in his honor, and six buildings once bore signs with that name.
Since Election Day in 2016, the owners of five buildings have decided to remove it — a stark demonstration of Trump’s unpopularity in the city that gave him his start, and which he still calls home.
Equity Residential, an apartment company that owns three nearby buildings, took down Trump’s name just after the election. Then the condo owners at 200 Riverside — facing legal warnings from the Trump Organization — went to court and persuaded a state judge to rule that the Trump Organization could not stop them from removing their sign.
The loss of the Trump name at 120 Riverside will not cost Trump’s company any revenue. The company does not manage the building or derive any ongoing licensing revenue from its use of the Trump name.
The Trump Organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent Thursday afternoon.
Trump still owns his businesses, although he has shifted day-to-day control to his eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.
Since his election, the president’s political career has alienated some of his old customers in left-leaning big cities and foreign countries.
In that time, the small Trump hotel empire has become smaller: Trump hotels in Panama City, Toronto and New York’s SoHo neighborhood have removed the president’s name. The company had planned to expand into dozens of U.S. cities with new lines of lower-cost hotels. But last week, Eric Trump announced that he was shelving that plan, saying politically driven criticism and media scrutiny had made it impossible.
In Manhattan, Trump’s name now adorns 11 condo buildings. The research firm CityRealty found that the price of condos in those buildings — measured in dollars per square foot — began to decrease in 2016 and continued to drop in 2018. Using that metric, Trump buildings once commanded a premium above other Manhattan buildings, but now the price per square foot that units in Trump buildings sell for is below average.
“Trump buildings have not performed as well as the rest of the market over the past 18 months,” said Daniel Levy, CityRealty’s president.
He said that it is difficult to determine the exact cause of the price depreciation but that “the data certainly suggests kind of a negative correlation between [the prices] and the presidency since he took office.”
Now, the last building with a “Trump Place” sign will be the one at 220 Riverside. In 2016, that building’s board rejected a name change, citing the potential for litigation and the cost of removing the sign, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The board at 220 Riverside did not immediately return calls for comment Thursday.