Another tidbyte from Cayce (Robert deserves a break occasionally):
Hard as it is to believe, there are interesting buildings outside of New York City. Although Manhattan boasts the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building and the Flatiron Building or, more recently, the IAC Headquarters, Hearst Building and the Austrian Cultural Foundation, here's a spot where you can view some beautiful, quirky, interesting, and, yes, STRANGE structures:
Would you like to live here?
Where would you like to live? Let us know...
With a few exceptions, Donald Trump's buildings are painfully bland. Admire the grand, century-old apartment buildings on Riverside Drive and then cringe at the row of mediocrity lining the West Side Highway, designated Trumpistan on the famous New Yorker cover that came out after September eleventh. One of the exceptions, I always felt, was Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, the sleek tower of black glass with trees planted in the recesses above Fifty-sixth, with its six-story atrium of pink marble, escalators and eighty-foot waterfall.
There was something fun about it. Playful. I sometimes laughed when I brought groups through the doors--not a derisive snort but a genuine giggle embraced as we immediately were by the gaudy wonderland excess. I moved to the city in 1990 and Trump Tower represented for me one aspect of the New York of the Eighties (i.e., Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities and Trump's own The Art of the Deal).
I was shocked this fall to find the atrium completely altered, redone, crapped up.
The National Debt Clock, invented by late real estate developer, Seymour Durst, is located on the side of a Durst Company buliding at 44th and Sixth.