ROOM WITHOUT A VIEW.(The Talk of the Town)(Central Park condominiums)

Let's say you're looking to drop fifteen or twenty million on a condo in the new, twin-towered Time Warner Center, on Columbus Circle. What might you be getting? Four or five thousand square feet, for a start. His and hers marble bathrooms. Ten-foot ceilings, nine-foot windows. A "world-class location." The "most commanding view of any residences overlooking Central Park." The list of perks and amenities goes on. But now, if your bedroom faces north (as most do), you'll get the added privilege of waking up each morning to a personal greeting from Donald Trump: "Your views aren't so great, are they? We have the real Central Park views and address! Best Wishes, 'The Donald.' "

By "we," the Donald means his Trump International Hotel and Tower, which looms, tall and dark, just across the roundabout from Time Warner. His taunt comes in the form of four banners affixed to the top floors of its south-facing side. With a double-take and a squint, you can read it from the street, and from the upper-floor windows of the new Time Warner condos it is impossible to miss, more prominent even than the iconic Christopher Columbus statue out front.

"We are on Central Park West," Trump said last week. "Our address is No. 1 Central Park West. They are not on Central Park, although they advertise that they are." The developers of the Time Warner Center have named their southern tower One Central Park, despite a postal address of 25 Columbus Circle. "They're not anywhere near Central Park," Trump continued. "What has happened is that people have gone up to their apartments for the first time, and they've looked at what they purchased. And they're aghast at what they see, because they see the back of my building."

Trump has a point. If Trump International is "less than a stone's throw" from the park, according to the standard sales pitch (and it is), then the residences at One Central Park are fairly more than a long javelin toss away, and are separated from it by some of the most treacherous pedestrian traffic crossings in the city. By distance-from-grass, the Time Warner condos have no more claim to a Central Park i.d. than an apartment building on, say, 112th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard.

Truth in advertising, of course, has never been a strength of the real-estate business. One may recall the "Simpsons" episode in which Marge goes to work as a real-estate agent and learns to substitute "motivated seller" for "that house is on fire." This is especially true in New York, where Trump has refined the embellishment ...