Overview

About The Savoy, 200 East 61st Street

It is exceedingly rare for competing developers to coordinate their building plans and produce projects that are mutually complimentary, if not beneficial. It is even rarer for such developments to have significant benefit for the city.

This building and Trump Plaza, at 167 East 61st Street, represent just such an example. The coordination, however, did not come easily, and it was negotiated by New York State Supreme Court Justice Edward J. Greenfield.

Philip Birnbaum & Associates designed both buildings.

Donald Trump built his tower at 167 East 61st Street first, in 1984, a very glossy but attractive apartment tower on Third Avenue with an attractive limestone low-rise base that extended the full-blockfront on the avenue.

Lo and behold, two years later in 1986, Morton L. Olshan and his partners began building a 42-story, 234-unit condominium, catty-corner clone!

In their wonderful book, "New York 2000, Architecture and Urbanism Between the Bicentennial and the Millennium," Robert A. M. Stern, David Fishman and Jacob Tilove wrote that "Whether Birnbaum's decision to twin his buildings was a result of urbanistic beau geste or artistic laziness would soon become a subject of public debate."

Mr. Trump, ever vigilant, filed a law suit against Olshan to make sure the project was different from his, and the case was settled out of court after the judge dictated specific changes in the fa?ade materials of Mr. Olshan's project.

The Olshan version is slightly different with a shinier base and more angled balconies, but from a distance these towers could almost be twins. More important, together they serve as a major gateway to the Upper East Side from the very hectic and important entrance and exit to the Queensborough Bridge and Bloomingdale's.

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