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Posted Jul 27, 2008, 5:19 PM
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You never sausage a place
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Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Boston, MA
Posts: 308
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http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/ci_10011136
Quote:
Trump Parc leads transformation of Stamford
Staff Reports
Stamford Advocate
STAMFORD - Since he was a boy growing up in the cornfields of Wisconsin, Lou Gorfain wanted to live in the big city. At 28, short on cash but flush with ambition, he fled the heartland and hopped onto a Greyhound bus bound for New York.
Almost 40 years later, Gorfain works as a television producer in Stamford.
His company, New Screen Concepts, produces shows like "Houston Medical" and "Extreme Makeover."
Gorfain has spent most of his life living in New York and still keeps an apartment in Manhattan.
But in 2004, after years of commuting from Westchester County, N.Y., the city-struck country boy who thought he could never give up life in the big city decided to make the leap to downtown Stamford.
And if you ask Gorfain, he'll say he hasn't really given up city life.
"I call it the 'Upper Upper East Side,'" he said with a grin.
The moniker just might stick.
Trump Parc, where Gorfain plans to move, will be the first luxury high-rise complex to be built in Stamford. The building is expected to be completed by next summer. Until he is able to move in, Gorfain will continue to rent an apartment downtown.
Luxury housing, in the form of sky-high condominiums, is promising to put a new face on downtown Stamford that is younger, more urban and sophisticated. Trump Parc, with its unprecedented views, design and 350-foot height - it is the first building to break the city's 21-story cap - represents the forefront of that movement. "It's really becoming a mini-Manhattan," said Jessica Rohm, senior managing director of sales and marketing for Trump Parc.
The 34-story tower will contain 170 units consisting of one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments and six duplex penthouses. One-bedroom units start at $731,000; the most expensive apartment, a penthouse, fetched $4.3 million.
With some of those hefty price tags will come views that reach as far as the Manhattan skyline.
As of today, about half the units have been sold to people who are largely immune to the mortgage crisis: 70 percent are young well-heeled professionals and 30 percent are empty nesters, all of them with deep pockets, Rohm said.
The state's buyer-friendly real estate laws - unlike New York, there is no mortgage recording tax, for example - lure New York buyers, in particular, she said.
They include people like Gorfain, who said he looked at Stamford as a place that provided "a big-town feel in a small-town environment."
While he said he loves the big city, there are small-town charms that he misses in New York.
"I can walk through neighborhoods here and still feel like I'm living in Milwaukee," he said.
"I can see kids on their bikes going to play baseball. You don't get that in Manhattan."
City officials have embraced Trump Parc as having the potential to drive the transformation of not only downtown but Stamford as a whole.
It has given greater urgency to the renovation of Mill River Park, a project given to fits and starts over the years.
"This is going to energize the park," said Sandra Goldstein, executive director of the Downtown Special Services District.
For Goldstein, the high-density building is in keeping with her mantra for downtown.
"Housing, housing, housing," she said. "And I mean housing of all kinds, for all income levels."
The residential population downtown has doubled in the past 10 years, Goldstein said.
Will the growth in Stamford's downtown create a spike in demand for public services?
That's precisely the hope, according to City Planner Norman Cole.
"We hope they will demand services," he said. "We want the residents of Trump Parc to be spilling out into open spaces like Mill River Park. We want to develop users so we can justify funding more services."
The gloomier alternative, he said, would be the downtown of years past, "a monoculture, where there was a rolling up of the sidewalks at night, and everyone went home."
But not everyone looks on Trump Parc as a tall beacon of hope for downtown.
Renee Kahn, director of the Stamford-based Historic Neighborhood Preservation Program Inc., sees it instead as a harbinger of things to come.
"The horse is out of the stable," she said. "Will this become the prototype where whatever local character we have left will be gone?" she said.
The building of one high-rise will lead to the building of many more to come, she said.
Kahn said she is skeptical about whether the city's infrastructure can support a high-density population surge.
Kahn's concerns include water supply, traffic issues and whether the city has enough sewage treatment facilities.
Cole said that water supply is handled privately in Stamford and that the city "hasn't seen any expression of concern from water treatment facilities."
But aside from the planning aspect, Kahn said she worries about the psychological impact that buildings like Trump will have on downtown.
In the years to come, will the city still feel like a hometown?
Kahn said she doesn't know. But a lot will depend on the residents of Trump Parc.
"It certainly will be a different downtown," she said. "Better? I don't know. But definitely different."
- Staff Writer Elizabeth Kim can be reached at elizabeth.kim@scni.com or at 964-2265.
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