“In New York,” Trump says, “I can build a box as-of-right [within existing regulations]. Or I can get a creative design, go through ten years of community boards, and still get refused 32 to zero. Given that choice, I’ll build a box.”

....On the mild Monday afternoon of December 11, 2006, excavation was proceeding apace when one of the cats abruptly stopped digging. A small cluster of hard hats gathered. Peering into the pit, the workers could plainly see a violated grave: skulls, ribs, vertebrae, right there under the excavator’s claw. The bones were found in the northeast corner of the pit, where an African Methodist Episcopal church had stood until 1963. They could have belonged to slaves or abolitionists. Another, since discarded, theory was Mafia hit victims—there used to be mobbed-up social clubs on the block, and the church itself vanished in what came to be seen as a suspicious fire....

...The mob ties came to light on December 17, when the Times published a pointed profile of 42-year-old Felix Sater, a no-title principal in Bayrock. Like Tamir Sapir, Sater was a Russian immigrant with family and business roots in Moscow. The story outed Sater (who had added an extra “t” to his name, perhaps trying to avoid precisely this kind of disclosure, and now goes by Satter) as an ex-con with possible Mafia connections. In 1991, as a twentysomething hotshot broker at Bear Stearns, Sater had apparently gotten into an argument with a colleague at a Mexican bar. He resolved the dispute by smashing a margarita glass and using the broken stem to stab the other broker in the face. He spent a year in jail for assault. The Times article also identified Sater as a player in a pump-and-dump stock scheme, and claimed he had secured mob protection for the scam. In 1998, investigators looking into the operation had searched Sater’s locker at a Manhattan Mini Storage—across the street from the future Trump Soho site—and found three guns and offshore-bank-account papers. Sater promptly fled to Russia, eventually returning to New York, where he helped build cases against nineteen other men involved in the matter. Trump, for his part, calls the Sapirs “great friends” but avoids any mention of Sater, whose company is involved in at least four other Trump projects....

...Yuriy Vanchytskyy, a Ukrainian construction worker from Greenpoint, plunged 42 stories when a wooden mold gave way. The fall decapitated him. “This is what we get when they make us rush the job,” a co-worker said...

....The condo-hotel model where every room does double duty is a first for these parts. It has a few quirks. Trump Soho unit owners won’t get to put in their own furnishings (Fendi will, complete with the interlocking F logos on the rugs) or hang their own artwork (it will come from a rotating in-house collection). They won’t even get their own keys; the front desk will handle every check-in and checkout. One privilege an owner will have over a guest—after forking over $3,000 per square foot, or more than $2 million, say, for a 682-square-foot unit—is the ability to kick the guest out. Should one require one’s “room” on short notice, the management will relocate the guest to a similar unit. Owners also get a secure master closet to hang a few suits in. But “Possess Your Own Closet in Soho” would probably lack the original slogan’s punch.

FUN FUN FUN!

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