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People are fighting in court for the right to not use Trump's name on things

Does a Trump building by any other name still glitter with gold?

Does a Trump building by any other name still glitter with gold? The residents of Trump Place, a New York condominium building operated by the Trump Organization, may be about to find out.

Last February, a majority of the condo owners who occupy Trump Place, which is located at 200 Riverside Boulevard in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, voted in an informal straw poll to change the building’s name. The Trump Organization, which manages the building but does not own it, placed the “Trump” moniker in golden lettering above the building’s entrance as part of a licensing agreement.

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Unsurprisingly, the straw poll didn’t sit well with the Trump Organization, which threatened to sue the building’s board for violating the license agreement. The board preemptively asked the courts to settle the issue.

On Thursday, New York Supreme Court Judge Eileen Bransten ruled that the residents of Trump Place are within their rights to strip the name “Trump” from the building. “That simply is not what the document says,” Bransten told the court of the licensing agreement, the Washington Post reported.

For now, however, Trump Place will stay Trump Place. The condo’s residents must vote to change the name by a two-thirds majority to move forward, Bransten ruled, and it’s unclear when or if that vote will ever take place. In the straw poll that kicked this whole case off, 63 percent of all owners said they’d like to change the name. Another 14 percent said they’d “re-assess” doing so in six months.

No matter what happens with the building’s name, the Trump Organization’s bottom line will remain the same, since it will manage the building, whatever it's called, until at least December 2019, according to the Post.

“I will always fight vehemently against rogue individuals not only to protect our incredible owners, but also to protect the legacy of a true visionary who did so much to shape the New York City skyline,” Eric Trump told the Washington Post in a statement.

The 200 Riverside Trump Place is hardly the first “Trump Place” to shed the president’s name. Three “Trump Places” in Manhattan also removed “Trump” from their facades shortly after the election last year, according to the New York Times; hotels in Panama, Toronto, and Lower Manhattan have also stripped Trump’s name off their properties.

"Nobody wants to go there,” Jeffrey Rabiea, who owned three hotel rooms in the Trump Panama hotel, told the Washington Post in January. “If you've got a Marriott and a Hyatt and a Trump, you're not going to Trump."

Cover image: President Trump listens during a joint news conference in the East Room of the White House on Tuesday in Washington, D.C. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)