VIEWS.(from high-rise buildings in New York, New York)

In recent months, Hudson River strollers and Henry Hudson Parkway drivers may have noticed a banner hanging between the seventh- and eighth-story windows of the Chatsworth, the old Beaux-Arts apartment building on Seventy-second Street at the foot of Riverside Park. The banner reads "TrumpPlaceIsChokingUs.com,"and it refers to the Chatsworth's campaign against the progressive encroachment of the not very Beaux-Arts apartment building going up next door, at Trump Place. Two weeks ago, the banner disappeared when the new Trump project, now seven stories tall and destined to be thirty-one, choked it out, too.

The mood in the Chatsworth these days recalls "The Cask of Amontillado,"the Edgar Allan Poe story about a man who is sealed, stone by stone, inside a basement crypt. Richard Seader, a Chatsworth resident since 1961 (back when Irving Berlin had already moved out and Conan O'Brien hadn't yet moved in), was home last week, acclimating himself to his darkening apartment. "We never needed the light on during the day, and all of a sudden you can't see without it,"he said. He recalled how he'd gone out in the morning, a week before, to do some errands and returned that afternoon to "blackness."

When Seader, a retired Broadway producer, first moved into his sixth-floor apartment, the view from the window in the kitchen looked out across the river to Weehawken and beyond. Now it looks out at the little bit of blue sky that peeks between concrete pilings, two-by-fours, and big guys in hard hats and T-shirts. Soon it will be gone altogether. You could barely fit a Sunday Times between the wall of Trump Place and Seader's fire escape--a safety hazard, Chatsworthians fear.

To show off a different Chatsworthian perspective, Seader rode the elevator upstairs to the tenth floor, to the spacious, light-filled apartment of his friends Henry and Marcia Saltzman. Henry looked out his dining-room window and, measuring with his fingers and counting imaginary floors, estimated that Trump Place would overtake his river view within a month. He seemed resigned to it.

"I ...