I Guess 1980s Excess Is Coming Back After All

Donald infiltration: complete. Form of: Soho condo-hotel. Just rolls off the tongue, that:

The city will approve construction permits for a condo hotel skyscraper that megadeveloper Donald Trump wants to build in western SoHo, the Daily News has learned.

Community groups who oppose his plans for the 45-story Trump SoHo Hotel Condominium got the word late Wednesday from elected officials, said Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.

Trump said yesterday that he hadn’t got the official okay from the Department of Buildings, which issues the construction permits. But he was upbeat anyway.

“It will be like all my other buildings,” he told The News. “Once they get built, everybody loves them.”

Trump is already doing excavation and site prep — for which he does have city permits — at his property at 246 Spring St., which had been a parking lot.

He’s planning a luxurious glass tower with 411 units designed by high-profile architect David Rockwell. Most floors will have superb views because it will be the tallest building between 23rd St. and lower Manhattan. There will also be a rooftop pool with cabanas.

A Ticking Time Bomb Scenario That Even Alan Dershowitz Can’t Abide

The couple who survives in a 265-square-foot apartment* one-ups themselves by having a baby:

When Sara Kate Gillingham-Ryan told friends late last winter that she was pregnant, they offered the obligatory congratulations. Then they asked when she was moving.

It was assumed that she and her husband, Maxwell, would have to go somewhere else. For four years the couple shared a 265-square-foot, one-bedroom rental on Bedford Street in the West Village, an apartment so preposterously miniature it could fit neatly inside the foyer of many apartments uptown. They made it work for the two of them in part by jettisoning clothes, a television and a home office. “It never felt too small,” said Ms. Gillingham-Ryan, 31, a food writer. “It helps to keep your life well edited.”

No amount of editing, it seemed, would create enough room for a baby. But after looking at more than a dozen apartments, and weighing the benefits of more square footage against the burden of debt, they decided to stay on Bedford Street, where they pay $780 a month for rent. And they would renovate to accomplish the seemingly impossible: accommodate a baby.

. . .

“The only problem with all this is kids,” Mr. Gillingham-Ryan said one day last month while Ursula napped in the bedroom. “She’s a ticking time bomb. She’s going to need room. We know we can’t stay here for long.”

*I guess the apartment gained 15 square feet since we last read about it.

Line, Line, Everywhere A Line

The halo effect claims another victim:

An early-morning argument over cutting into line at a popular Midtown falafel cart turned deadly yesterday when a man stabbed a teenager in the chest, cops said.

Tyrone Gibbons, 19, of Short Hills, N.J., was standing in line at a falafel cart at 53rd Street and Sixth Avenue at around 4 a.m., when he and his friends got into an argument with Ziad Tayeh, 23 about cutting the line, police said.

After a heated exchange, Gibbons and his pals hopped in their car, and Tayeh got in his. But when they stopped at a light on 53rd Street and Seventh Avenue, they started arguing again.

“They were not happy with each other,” a police official said.

When the light changed, they turned south onto Seventh Avenue, but again stopped at a light at 52nd Street, and the fight erupted all over again.

Then Tayeh jumped out of his white Lexus and allegedly plunged a blade into Gibbons’ chest, cops said.

Tayeh hopped back into his car and sped off, and Gibbons was rushed to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 4:40 a.m., police said.

Manhattan: Borough Of Shoes

Enterprising bikini traffickers try their hardest to erase whatever culture remains in Manhattan:

Owners of the Hawaiian Tropic Zone, an 800-person-capacity restaurant that just opened on 49th Street, recruited ambitious women from pageant competitions across America as its first wave of bikini-clad employees. Those women have since been joined by 82 local waitresses.

The out-of-towners live in a dorm-like apartment on the Upper East Side — it’s “The Real World” meets “Gidget.”

“It is a great opportunity for me to get closer to my dreams of becoming a model,” said Jennifer Johnson, a 26-year-old who left her job teaching fourth grade in Dallas after winning the Miss Texas Hawaiian Tropic contest.

Her roommate and fellow Texan, Sarah Jo Lammers, a 24-year-old from Corpus Christi with a finance degree, bolted the business world to pursue a modeling dream here.

The Texans live with eight other recruits in two three-bedroom pads in an eight-story walkup on the Upper East Side owned by Dennis Riese, who owns the Hawaiian Tropic Zone with PM nightclub honcho Adam Hock.

Under the terms of their Hawaiian Tropic Zone deals, the models live rent free for six months, pay $200 for the seventh month, $400 the eighth and $600 a month until they leave. They also get discounted gym memberships and tanning, because they’re required to take part in both.

In return, they weave in and out between crowded tables as waitresses for the restaurant, welcoming guests, serving drinks and taking dinner orders while wearing Nicole Miller bikinis.

Every night is a beauty pageant. The waitresses strut their stuff twice a shift in front of the usual crowd of suit-clad bankers and brokers who quiet down and cast their paper ballots for the hottie they most admire.

The pageant winner gets a $100 bonus on top of $100 for each eight-hour shift and tips as high as $100 per table.

“I went out and bought shoes, which are everywhere in this city,” Johnson said, recalling a whopping gratuity from one admirer.

Closing Of CBGB Completes “Cultural Rape” Of The East Village

CBGB has closed:

Last night was the last concert at CBGB, the famously crumbling rock club that has been in continuous, loud operation since December 1973, serving as the casual headquarters and dank incubator for some of New York’s most revered groups — [Patti] Smith’s, the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, Television, Sonic Youth — as well as thousands more whose blares left less of a mark on history but whose graffiti and concert fliers might still remain on its walls.

After a protracted real estate battle with its landlord, a nonprofit organization that aids the homeless, CBGB agreed late last year to leave its home at 313 and 315 Bowery at the end of this month. And Ms. Smith’s words outside the club, where her group was playing, encapsulated the feelings shared by fans around the city and around the world: CBGB is both the scrappy symbol of rock’s promise and a temple that no one wanted to see go.

. . .

“It’s the cultural rape of New York City that this place is being pushed out,” said John Nikolai, a black-clad 36-year-old photographer from Staten Island whose tie read “I quit.”

Added Ms. Smith outside the club, “It’s a symptom of the empty new prosperity of our city.”

Meanwhile, the Daily News Don McLeanizes CBGB with a maudlin headline — “The Night Music Died”:

The birthplace of punk, CBGB, where bands such as the Ramones and Talking Heads got their start, threw its own headbanging funeral last night.

With rock poet Patti Smith offering the expletive-laden eulogy to the grungy Bowery icon, Mohawk-wearing mourners took one final twirl in the mosh pit.

“You know what’s sad? Turning New York City into the suburbs,” Smith said. “The whole thing’s sad. This is just a symptom of the empty prosperity of our times.”

You know what is actually sad? Fetishizing Manhattan and turning punk rock into a museum piece . . .