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Donald Trump has two new friends - but Marla Maples needn't worry. The new friends are the city of New York and the state of New York, both of which have come out strongly in favor of Trump's plan to develop 76 choice acres of Upper West Side riverfront land called the Penn Yards. City officials will conduct a hearing today at which Trump is seeking to get official approval for the plan.
Neither the city nor the state was on Trump's side in the late 1980s, when he tried to sell a plan to build the world's tallest building just below Riverside Park.
While city officials would not confirm this, both Trump and his opponents expect the commission to "certify" Trump's application for the recycled development, now called Riverside South, which stretches along the Hudson River from 59th Street to 72nd Street. The certification would put the project into the land-use political process and force community groups and politicians to vote on the plan during the next seven months.
One controversial aspect of that process is sure to be the Planning Commission's determination that the development, calling for 8.3 million square feet of residential and commercial space on the site, will not require any significant changes in zoning regulations to win final approval.
Robert Flahive, director of the Manhattan office of the Department of City Planning, told New York Newsday that the density of the proposed development has not changed much since the site was rezoned for commercial and residential use in 1982. Any zoning problems, he said, could be dealt with through "special permits."
Cries of betrayal from longtime allies, broken friendships and reshuffled political alliances are just a few of the results of the March 5, 1991,...