My building looks a little small
November 2, 2016 11:21 AM   Subscribe

“Can you make my building taller?” Mr. Trump asked. No, he was told. “Well, can you make the G.M. building shorter?”
While the practice of misnumbering floors in some of the city's most opulent buildings has been going on for some time, ''Donald Trump is the father of this." New York City's Buildings Department does not object, so long as the floors are counted accurately in the building’s certificate of occupancy.
posted by plexi (53 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
“Can you make my building taller?” Mr. Trump asked. No, he was told. “Well, can you make the G.M. building shorter?”

I can imagine the exact same dialogue being used as the caption to a New Yorker cartoon. I don't think that I need to say what caption it could be replaced with.
posted by ambrosen at 11:25 AM on November 2, 2016 [16 favorites]


I've been dropping the phrase "post-fact society" a lot this election season, and it's good(?) sometimes to be reminded that nope, we've always been stupid.
posted by phunniemee at 11:27 AM on November 2, 2016 [12 favorites]


In a fight between the Donald Trumps of the world and the guy who is really disappointed to learn he's only on the 56th floor, I pick the sweet release of death.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 11:33 AM on November 2, 2016 [4 favorites]


''It's a sales gimmick,'' said Frank Williams, the architect for Trump Palace at 68th Street and Third Avenue, at 623 feet, the tallest building on the Upper East Side.

"Sales gimmick," in plain language, means "lie," apparently.
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:37 AM on November 2, 2016 [7 favorites]


“Can you make my Presidency popular?” Mr. Trump asked. No, he was told. “Well, can you make the ones before me more unpopular?”
posted by Thorzdad at 11:39 AM on November 2, 2016 [24 favorites]


You know what they say about real-estate magnates with short…buildings, right?
posted by adamrice at 11:39 AM on November 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


When is someone going to just go full Trump and have a building with a 12,000th floor penthouse.

At ground level.
posted by GuyZero at 11:42 AM on November 2, 2016 [2 favorites]


everything about this fucko is fake 🤢
posted by Foci for Analysis at 11:43 AM on November 2, 2016 [5 favorites]


Is this the new election thread?

(In the new election thread can we start the comments with comment 100? That way there'd be more total comments in the thread!)
posted by chavenet at 11:44 AM on November 2, 2016 [12 favorites]


Mod note: I'll make y'all a deal and let this interesting post about a sort of goofy real estate phenomenon happen if you promise to not make me have to pay attention to it like an election thread just because Trump is peripherally involved.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:44 AM on November 2, 2016 [34 favorites]


Okay, is this the new election thread though

Edit window: gah
posted by potrzebie at 11:45 AM on November 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


No clearly this is Frog Fractions 2
posted by wemayfreeze at 11:47 AM on November 2, 2016 [8 favorites]


hello, this is dog
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:53 AM on November 2, 2016 [6 favorites]




Is there a half floor with a door hidden behind a cabinet where you can jump into the mind of a movie star?
Or better yet, a floor in trump tower furnished only with small accessories to make hands look yuge (or in some cases, normal) ?
posted by lmfsilva at 11:56 AM on November 2, 2016 [3 favorites]


I love how stuff like this is a Necker cube for beholders; for some, it signifies that Trump is insecure and a liar; for others, it means he's an innovator who just doesn't GAF.

I'll be drinking under my desk for the rest of the afternoon.
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 11:57 AM on November 2, 2016 [9 favorites]


I guarantee you there is no problem up there . . .
posted by Bee'sWing at 11:59 AM on November 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


In an effort to generalize this and non-election-fy it, and to riff off the Mitch Hederberg story...

New York's been mis-numbering floors since well before this. One of the things I do for work is run the new-employee orientations, and they give me a couple minutes to geek out about our 1920's landmark-status building. And one of the things I always call attention to is the fact that our company is located on the 10th, 11th, 12th, and 14th floors, and I ask people to guess "why not the 13th?" Someone invariably guesses right (even if it's with an incredulous, "c'mon, it's not because of superstition, is it?").

I try to work that in because we once had someone transfer over here from London, and she later told me she spent an entire two weeks taking the elevator between the 12th and 14th floors because "that's two flights on the stairs, I'll take the elevator". Sometimes, if we've got a little more time, I mention the movie 1408 and refer to Samuel L. Jackson's observation to John Cusack about how "you know what floor you're really on, right?"
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:03 PM on November 2, 2016 [5 favorites]


furnished only with small accessories to make hands look yuge

I can totally see Trump doing this with his desk accessories: buying the mini versions of office supplies, requiring his secretaries/future wives to specially cut all paper down to 9x7, getting 6oz tumblers instead of 8oz for his whiskey.
posted by bonehead at 12:09 PM on November 2, 2016 [6 favorites]


I used to live in a 14th floor apartment that was actually a 13th floor apartment and once (true story) a queen wasp somehow managed to get into my interior bathroom wall and build a nest behind the bathroom cabinet and these wasps kept flying out from behind my bathroom mirror and finding nothing to eat and slowly dying of starvation and/or stinging people in frustration and then dying of starvation and the maintenance staff refused to believe that there were wasps coming out of my 14th (13th) floor bathroom wall for over a month and kept accusing me of opening my window screens and letting them in from outside somehow which I obviously wasn't because why would I WANT wasps in my apartment and meanwhile the wasps kept coming out of my wall and terrorizing my guests and my cats like a slow motion horror movie for weeks and no one I talked to about this would believe me until they saw a wasp or five come out of the bathroom wall themselves but by then of course it was always TOO LATE and I guess that my point is that renaming a 13th floor apartment as a 14th floor apartment doesn't stop it from being secretly full of wasps.
posted by BlueJae at 12:15 PM on November 2, 2016 [75 favorites]


In Hong Kong, luxury apartment buildings rarely have a fourth floor (Cantonese for four is a homonym for "death") or a 14th ("definitely dying").
posted by Mister Bijou at 12:24 PM on November 2, 2016 [3 favorites]


I think all favorites in this thread should count as 10 but only show up as 6 on the favoritee's profile page.
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:32 PM on November 2, 2016 [3 favorites]


In Hong Kong, luxury apartment buildings rarely have a fourth floor (Cantonese for four is a homonym for "death") or a 14th ("definitely dying").
posted by Mister Bijou at 12:24 PM on November 2 [+] [!]


I guess everything is relative. Like the size of your, um, desk accessories.
posted by spacely_sprocket at 12:34 PM on November 2, 2016


Things brings to mind the idiotic movie trope of hidden floors, as if they would not be trivial to find by taking the stairs.
posted by Bovine Love at 12:44 PM on November 2, 2016


Building too short? You could be suffering from an erectile dysfunction.
posted by Bringer Tom at 12:50 PM on November 2, 2016 [2 favorites]


The building where I work skips the 10th floor on the lobby elevators, but I'm fairly certain that's just because it's where they keep the bodies and you have to use the freight elevator for that.
posted by roue at 12:51 PM on November 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


In a way, I used to like Donald the shameless huckster. He was an amusing, ridiculous, and predictable character, and seemed harmless enough. He'd come along, do his thing, we'd all laugh and take none of it seriously, and he'd leave again. Sort of a Rip Taylor of Big Business.

And now that Donald is gone. He's not harmless, and he never was. It's not all an act -- he really is that repulsive. And he never leaves.

Misnumbering floors is something I would have appreciated of the old Donald. Now it's just more proof of his being some failed and dangerous prototype of a human being.
posted by Capt. Renault at 1:10 PM on November 2, 2016 [4 favorites]


As a midwesterner, I'm still just baffled that they put the best units on the top floors, that higher numbers would be better. Do they have some kind of supersonic elevators in NYC or something? That 90th floor penthouse at One57--if I was in the market for a $100 million property, I feel like I'd see "90th floor" and immediately start imagining that I was going to spend half my commute just getting from the street up to my front door. I just signed a lease for an apartment that's $100/mo more than my initial budget because they had a first-floor unit available. City people are weird, man.
posted by Sequence at 1:24 PM on November 2, 2016 [2 favorites]


BlueJae, I want to favorite your comment, but it's at 14. Somehow that is right and correct. Sorry about that.
posted by Hactar at 1:39 PM on November 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


And it went to 16 in the course of me writing that comment. I'll leave this thread now, as apparently no one shares my sense of aesthetics.
posted by Hactar at 1:40 PM on November 2, 2016 [2 favorites]


As a midwesterner, I'm still just baffled that they put the best units on the top floors, that higher numbers would be better. Do they have some kind of supersonic elevators in NYC or something?

...Kinda?

They do have some fast elevators, but you're more likely to see separated banks - like, there's one set of elevators that only goes to floors 1 through 20, and then another set that only goes to floors 20 through 40, etc. So the people on the 90th floor may not have high-speed elevators, but they will have dedicated elevators that would be stopping at no more than a handful of other floors before going straight to the lobby.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:44 PM on November 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


Given that: 7 is considered lucky in the west, and 13 unlucky
Also given that: 4 and 14 are considered unlucky in the east, with 8 lucky

I propose that: Floor and unit numbering be changed to make buildings seem as lucky as possible to everyone.

As such, the first floor of any building should be 8. The second floor should be 88, the third 888, the fourth 88,888 (to skip the luck-jamming effects of having four 8s) and so on. Skip both 8,888,888,888,888 and 88,888,888,888,888, to avoid having a number of 8s that anyone might find unlucky.

Meanwhile, units on each floor should be numbered starting with 7, so: 7, 77, 777, 77,777 (skip four 7s!), 777,777, and so on, remembering to skip 7,777,777,777,777 and 77,777,777,777,777.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:54 PM on November 2, 2016 [9 favorites]


alternate schemes are possible wherein 7s and 8s are mixed, rather than having one represent floors and the other units, but those systems should be avoided because of how they might make wayfinding unnecessarily difficult.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:56 PM on November 2, 2016 [2 favorites]


unit 77,777,777 on the 88,888,888th floor would sell/rent at a premium price, as would unit 7,777,777 on the 8,888,888th floor.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 2:06 PM on November 2, 2016 [6 favorites]


Do you get to the missing floors from platform 9 3/4?
posted by yoga at 2:10 PM on November 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


Semi-related: Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators "You're Gonna Miss Me"
posted by bendy at 2:15 PM on November 2, 2016


I really can't wrap my head around somebody who, simultaneously:

a) is convinced that certain numbers, eg.: 13, are 'unlucky', whatever that means.

&

b) is comforted by the fact that, even though they live on the 13th floor of a building, at least it's labelled 14.

It puts me in mind of the people who at the same time believe in 'prophecy' and also think they can do something to hurry it along, e.g.: american evangelicals who support Israel in order to hasten the Apocalypse.

I get that some people are religious and/or superstitious, but the ability to hold mutually contradictory beliefs is beyond me.
posted by signal at 2:27 PM on November 2, 2016 [3 favorites]


furnished only with small accessories to make hands look yuge

Stop living with small hands…
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 2:30 PM on November 2, 2016


Nah, it's not that hard to wrap your head around. It's not about some essential fact about the floor you're on, or about numbers as sequential — it's not about living twelve floors above the first floor — but is instead about the number itself.

If it helps, think of "13" as a name rather than as a numeral. Under the rules of perceived number luck, you don't want to live on the floor named 13, regardless of whether or not there's exactly twelve floors under it.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 2:36 PM on November 2, 2016 [6 favorites]


The thing that's tricky is that although number luck magic doesn't work, the idea of number luck magic doubtlessly exists. Because of its existence as an actual idea that people actually hold, it's irrational in some cases not to play along. If you're developing a high rise, you might be throwing a small (but not negligible) amount of money away by including a floor numbered 13, on the one hand because superstitious people exist, and on the other hand because people are irrationally attached to having/being in the tallest building possible, and skipping a floor (for whatever reason) makes it possible to make your building seem just that much taller.

Human beliefs can be interpreted as "right" or "wrong," but they can also be interpreted as terrain, without any regard whatsoever given to their correctness or incorrectness.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 2:42 PM on November 2, 2016 [6 favorites]


Superstition causes bad luck.
posted by Floydd at 2:46 PM on November 2, 2016 [3 favorites]


Maybe if you made the building as a skeletal framework, and had robots that went up and down the frame pulling out and swapping floors so that you never knew which physical floor you were on.
posted by ckape at 2:53 PM on November 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


I just signed a lease for an apartment that's $100/mo more than my initial budget because they had a first-floor unit available.

I am also from the Midwest, but most of the people I know aimed for top floor units, usually 3rd at the most. 1) It was supposedly safer (no idea if stats actually bear this out and maybe only Midwestern girls got this lecture?) and 2) Then you don't have to listen to someone stomping around above you.

Now that I'm back in a city, I sometimes get irritated by waiting for the elevators. But then the view when I walk in always puts me right back in a good mood. It's usually only busy during "rush hour."

We do have a 13th floor here, but my first apartment in Seattle years ago skipped 13.
posted by ghost phoneme at 2:55 PM on November 2, 2016


I just signed a lease for an apartment that's $100/mo more than my initial budget because they had a first-floor unit available. City people are weird, man.

Have you never lived below a toddler or a surly teenager with a basketball? I will never do that again.
posted by winna at 2:56 PM on November 2, 2016 [5 favorites]


The only time I ever worked in a building with more than 2 floors was a 12-story mini-skyscraper in West Los Angeles. It was all the same company's home office, except for the top floor which they leased to somebody else who wanted 'top floor' prestige, while the President/CEO/Bigwigs' offices were all on the SECOND floor. I considered that a good sign. But the company went under investing in Junk Bonds recommended by Michael Milkin, so "cool" dos not always equal "smart".
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:04 PM on November 2, 2016


A couple years ago, one of the elevators at Boston City Hall got stuck between the third and fifth floors. Firefighters couldn't simply open the doors on the fourth floor to get the people out because Boston City Hall doesn't have a fourth floor.
posted by adamg at 3:15 PM on November 2, 2016 [2 favorites]


In Hong Kong, luxury apartment buildings rarely have a fourth floor (Cantonese for four is a homonym for "death") or a 14th ("definitely dying").
posted by Mister Bijou at 3:24 AM on November 3 [2 favorites +] [!]
Same thing is true for some buildings in Tokyo. But in Shanghai, they take it to the next level (ha!). There are buildings that refuse to use the number four at all. So, for instance, the whole 40-49 block is missing as well as every _4th floor.
posted by michswiss at 3:40 PM on November 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


> But in Shanghai, they take it to the next level (ha!). There are buildings that refuse to use the number four at all. So, for instance, the whole 40-49 block is missing as well as every _4th floor.

soon. soon someone will adopt my "8s and 7s only" numbering scheme. it's inevitable.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 3:47 PM on November 2, 2016 [6 favorites]


I spent a few days once working in an office building in Shanghai that attempted to placate both Chinese and Western sensibilities--it skipped straight from the 12th floor to the 15th.
posted by fermion at 4:39 PM on November 2, 2016 [3 favorites]


There's a Wikipedia page that talks about this a bit and about how many European nations count the floor above the ground floor as 1, so you can't leave the building if you press 1 as I discovered more than once (my brain is slow). It mentions public housing blocks in the UK that only count every other floor, to save on elevator door costs (if you want to go to the floor between '3' and '4', you get out on '3' and take the stairs).

The page has an odd table where they compare the British, North American, Russian, and Hawaiian ways of numbering floors. (Hawaiian? Ah, Wikipedia. Now I wonder if the UK public housing statement is actually true).
posted by eye of newt at 9:33 PM on November 2, 2016


it skipped straight from the 12th floor to the 15th

It was like this at my last apartment building. This is common in Vancouver towers but the city doesn't allow number skipping anymore in new developments because the fire department complained of potential confusion should there be a fire on any floor higher than the third.
posted by praiseb at 10:49 PM on November 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


eye of newt, I'm fairly sure there's a multi-storey car park in Liverpool that I remember from my childhood that only has lift access on even-numbered floors, but it's almost like two buildings shoved together so the even numbered floors aren't directly above the odd-numbered ones but next to and between, if that makes sense.
posted by corvine at 3:14 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]


Lots of car parks alternate levels by half a story; it minimizes the length of ramps.
posted by Mitheral at 4:48 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]


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