13
Manhattan
HOW MUCH IS A STREET NAME WORTH?

In 1997, Donald Trump threw a black-tie bash for his new building bordering Columbus Circle and Central Park West, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. “This is the most successful condominium tower ever built in the United States, did you hear me say that earlier?” he told a journalist. His own apartment was a nine-thousand-square-foot glass box in the sky. (“Nobody has ever seen a room this big, with this high a ceiling, with this much glass.”) Trump’s divorce lawyer came to the party, but Marla Maples, whom Trump had separated from, stayed home. The tower had been built into the skeleton of an old office building, swaddled in bronze reflective glass. “It looks cheap.” “It’s Miami Beach.” “It’s really awful.” “Why didn’t you warn us?” angry New Yorkers asked Herbert Muschamp, The New York Times’s architectural critic. Muschamp himself called it a 1950s skyscraper “in a 1980s gold lamé party dress.”

The building’s advertising was a mishmash of half-truths. Trump did not actually own the whole building; the General Electric Pension Trust did. Trump said the building had fifty-two floors when it only had forty-four; he had invented a new math that determined how many floors his buildings would have if each floor had “average” ceiling height. The fact that the extra floors don’t actually exist didn’t seem to matter. Trump’s math has since become common among New York developers.

And then there was the address. The new building’s address wasn’t exactly a lie, but it wasn’t the original one the city had issued. Instead, Trump’s development company had asked the city to change the building’s address from 15 Columbus Circle to 1 Central Park West. (Columbus Circle was then little more than a polluted traffic magnet.) Ads for the building described it as “the most important new address in the world.”

[ Return to the review of “The Address Book.” ]

But Trump’s wasn’t the only 1 Central Park West for long. A few years later, Time Warner built a tower behind Trump’s, naming it One Central Park—even though its address was really 25 Columbus Circle.

Trump’s face went from orange to red. “We are on Central Park West,” he told the New Yorker. “Our address is No. 1 Central Park West. They are not on Central Park, although they advertise that they are.” Trump’s building obstructed their views over the great park.

Trump unfurled a giant banner high on the side of his building, directly facing the rival building. “Your views aren’t so great, are they? We have the real Central Park views and address. Best Wishes, The Donald.” For perhaps the first and only time, the New Yorker printed the words: “Trump has a point.”

“Perhaps the most misunderstood concept in all of real estate is that the key to success is location, location, location,” Trump (or, perhaps, his coauthor) wrote in The Art of the Deal, in 1987. “Usually that’s said by people who don’t know what they’re talking about.” You don’t need the best location, just the best deal. “Just as you can create leverage, you can enhance a location, through promotion and through psychology.”

But this kind of real estate “psychology” wasn’t a new idea. By the time Trump began to develop his first buildings in the 1970s, New Yorkers had already been bullshitting street names for more than a hundred years.

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In the 1870s, landlords on the Upper West Side of Manhattan got together to talk about street names. The West Side was filled with slums, or “Shantytowns.” Crudely built wooden or mud shacks housed immigrant families, who grew vegetables on the land and raised goats for milk. The men often labored nearby, and the women sorted trash, looking for rags and valuables they could sell. The landlords, who never visited unarmed, found that traditional methods of eviction weren’t always successful. In one case, as The New York Times reported, “a Deputy Marshal, wandering about Eighty-first Street serving papers, was seized, and a milk-can, half filled, was turned over his head like a hat.” As Reuben Rose-Redwood vividly describes, uptown landlords, gathered together as the West Side Association, began to look for less conventional weapons to attract a “better class” to their neighborhood slums.

Street names were an early tool for gentrification. “We all know how it is, that any name, good or bad, once fastened to a locality, is pretty sure to stick,” A. W. Colgate told the West Side Association. “We should also remember that good names cost no more than bad ones, and that the only way to avoid the bad, is to be beforehand with the good.” Shantytown residents were going to leave the place with low-class names that would tarnish street signs forever. “Witness in London,” he said, “Rotten row, Hog lane, Crabtree street, Peacock street, Shoe lane, and others equally as absurd, which had their origin in this way, and which generally retain their homely names even though their neighborhoods become aristocratic.”

“Hog Lane” wasn’t such an outlandish prediction. What used to be known as Dutch Hill was already called Goat Hill. There were five pigs for every person in New York. Charles Dickens was astounded by the sheer number of “portly sows” that roamed the streets of New York. “They are the city scavengers, these pigs,” he wrote admiringly. “Ugly brutes they are; having, for the most part, scanty brown backs, like the lids of old horsehair trunks: spotted with unwholesome black blotches.”

To stop the unsavory streets from turning into unsavory street names, the West Side Association took action. Manhattan’s streets and avenues, now laid out in a grid, had numbers for names. But the landlords were not aiming for the equality numbers promised; quite the opposite. Edward Clark, the president of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, was a major local landowner and a member of the association. In addition to advocating for forward-thinking development of a mix of suitable tenements, apartments, and single-family houses, he proposed that the names of the numbered avenues be changed. He thought that “the names of the newest states and territories have been chosen with excellent taste,” and suggested Montana Place for Eighth Avenue, Wyoming Place for Ninth Avenue, Arizona Place for Tenth Avenue, and Idaho Place for Eleventh Avenue.

Clark’s colleagues, however, were deaf to his all-American suggestions. In 1880, Eleventh Avenue was christened West End Avenue after a long-fashionable district in London, and Central Park West became the new name of Eighth Avenue in 1883. Finally, in 1890, Ninth Avenue became Columbus, and Tenth became Amsterdam. The western-name-loving Clark had to be content with naming his new luxury apartment building at Central Park West and 72nd Street the Dakota.

It was a kind of hollowed-out Field of Dreams policy. If you want a posh street, give it a posh name. It’s no accident that Central Park West is an expensive address; the name was specifically chosen to be expensive.

More than a hundred years later, in 2008, the clean-shaven brothers and property developers William and Arthur Zeckendorf finished their building on 15 Central Park West, not far away from Trump’s. The Zeckendorfs demolished the old Mayflower Hotel to make way for their building, and they purportedly had to pay the last rent-controlled tenant, a bachelor and recluse, more than $17 million for his 350-square-foot room. The investment paid of. Fifty-four stories high, 15 Central Park West sold out long before it was even built. Prices were raised nineteen times. Architecture critic Paul Goldberger at the time called it “the most financially successful apartment building in the history of New York.”

In 2016, the Zeckendorfs turned to a new project, this one on the Upper East Side. New York City regulations limit building heights, but developers can buy the air rights from a nearby site that is not using its allowance. The Zeckendorfs paid Park Avenue’s Christ Church $40 million for seventy thousand square feet of air rights to build what one real estate agent called a “Viagra” building—tall and straight. But the deal with Christ Church wasn’t just about making the building taller. The Zeckendorfs also promised an annual payment of $30,000 to the church for one hundred years in exchange for one simple thing: its address. The Zeckendorfs’ new mega building, 520 Park Avenue, does not even have frontage on Park Avenue; it is actually on East 60th Street, 150 feet west of that avenue.

[ Return to the review of “The Address Book.” ]

How is this possible? In New York, even addresses are for sale. The city allows a developer, for the bargain price of $11,000 (as of 2019), to apply to change the street address to something more attractive. (Cashier’s check or money order only, please.) The city’s self-named vanity address program is an unusually forthright acknowledgment that addresses—rather than just locations—can be sold to the highest bidder. In the early years of the program, vanity addresses were granted with little regard to whether they made any sense. Circling around Madison Square Garden and Penn Station, the numbers of Penn Plaza addresses, in order, are 1, 15, 11, 7, and 5. You can’t even reach the atrium of 237 Park Avenue from Park Avenue, because it’s actually on Lexington. No one would describe 11 Times Square as being anywhere close to Times Square. (Times Square is itself a kind of vanity address, having been renamed from Long-acre Square in 1904 when The New York Times moved there.) But there’s a good reason. An apartment on Park Avenue or Fifth Avenue can cost 5 to 10 percent more than an equivalent property on nearby cross streets.

The formal vanity street address program exploded in the time of borough president (and later mayor) David Dinkins, when the city was trying to attract more development. Basically, if the post office didn’t care, it was okay with the city. (If the post office did care, it was probably okay with the city, too.) Some international buyers may be fooled, but even many New Yorkers, well aware that they won’t actually live on Park Avenue, are still willing to pay to say that they do.

I requested a list of vanity street names from the borough of Manhattan. Some of the specially designated addresses were obviously desirable, either because of the fashionable street name or the nice round number. There are the 1s (1 Times Square, 1 World Financial Center, 1 Columbus Place); the 1 plazas (1 Haven Plaza, 1 Liberty Plaza, 1 Police Plaza); the Avenues, Squares, and Circles (400 Fifth Avenue, 4 Times Square, 35 Columbus Circle). Some corner buildings puzzlingly choose to locate their entrance on what sounds like the less fancy street. (This does not necessarily require a vanity address change.) For example, a condo building, the Lucida, uses 151 East 85th Street as its address instead of Lexington Avenue because, apparently, it sounds more chic. Another apartment building chose an address on East 74th Street rather than Madison Avenue because the developer wanted to make it sound like a more “boutique-type property.”

Even before the vanity address program, as Andrew Alpern describes, developers had named their buildings to boost their images. They borrowed grand English names: Berkeley, Blenheim, Carlyle, Westminster, Windsor, and even Buckingham Palace. Then the Continental names: Grenoble, Lafayette, Versailles, Madrid, El Greco, the Venetian. And then the Native American names closer to home: the Dakota, the Wyoming, and the Idaho. But now developers could change their buildings’ addresses, too.

Vanity addresses seem like a cheap way to increase the value of real estate, but they can cost more than money. Police and firemen might struggle to find a building with a Fifth Avenue address that is not actually on Fifth Avenue (one problem Manhattan and rural West Virginia share). In Chicago, where a similar program allowed developers to manipulate addresses, thirty-one-year-old Nancy Clay died in an office fire when fire- fighters didn’t realize that One Illinois Center was actually on the less grandly named East Wacker Drive.

I went to visit the Manhattan Topographical Bureau, tucked away in a small corner of the David N. Dinkins Manhattan Municipal Building’s million square feet of offices. There, Hector Rivera works in a windowless room filled with hundreds of the city’s maps, including John Randel’s maps of the then-newly gridded city. Rivera grew up in New York in the Frederick Douglass Houses, a series of subsidized houses in upper Manhattan. In high school, he won an internship in the Borough President’s office and never left; by now he has spent half his life in his office, curating the maps, managing house numbers, visiting building sites, and fielding questions about the streetscape. When developers want to build new buildings, it’s Rivera who researches the history of the street, to make sure, as he puts it, your shovel isn’t going to hit a skull.

Rivera takes great pride in the orderly numbering of houses in his hometown, and later he showed me the complex systems he has created to manage the databases. Files on every street in the city are meticulously sorted in drawers in the Map Room. Hector only helps administer the vanity address program; the borough president is the one who actually has to approve the change. But it’s obvious vanity addresses aren’t Hector’s ideal. “Of course, you get more money per square foot,” he told me, “but, yeah, it doesn’t make sense if you spend three million dollars on a place an ambulance can’t find if you have a heart attack.” Still, he had a stack of applications for vanity addresses on his desk.

All around us in Manhattan, cranes hovered, adding millions of square feet to the city’s skyline. I told Hector it must be hard keeping up with the developers. “It’s New York,” he told me with a half-smile. “Everything always changes.”

Street names can add or subtract value all over the world. At Sacred Heart College in Geelong, Australia, high school students came up with a useful research project, identifying twenty-seven streets in Victoria with goofy names (“Butt Street,” “Wanke Road,” “Beaver Street.”) Having pored over details from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, they found that property on these streets costs 20 percent less than adjacent streets—on average, about $140,000 in savings on a Melbourne house in the median price range.

It’s not just the street’s first name that matters. In the UK, addresses ending in “Street” fetched less than half of those that ended with “Lane.” “Is it the association of the word street— street urchins and streetwalkers?” Richard Coates, a professor of linguistics, asked in the Guardian. “You don’t get avenue urchins, do you?” Disturbingly, houses on roads named “King” or “Prince” were also worth more than those on “Queen” or “Princess.” A UK property website spokesman summed it up: “The saying goes that the three most important factors in buying a house are location, location, location; our research shows that even the road name you choose can make a diference to how much you can expect to pay when finding a property.”

Some street names are valuable, of course, because of what the street name says about the street itself. Real estate property experts Spencer Rascof and Stan Humphries pointed out that homes on Washington Street are more likely to be older than those on Washington Court. (“Courts,” “Circles,” and “Ways” were popular in the United States in the 1980s.) If you live on a boulevard, you probably have a lot of neighbors; if you live on a lane, you probably don’t. Homes on streets containing “Lake” are worth about 16 percent more than the national median, probably because, yes, they are near a picturesque lake.

[ Return to the review of “The Address Book.” ]