You Probably Shouldn't Name Your Building After a Terrorist Organization

March 10, 2016 — The frenzy to come up with a name that lends a certain je ne sais quoi – and, just maybe, enhanced value – to New York City apartment buildings has been known to go to comical lengths.

People exhibit inexhaustible imaginative powers when it comes to coining a name that will drape a building with the perfect aura. There are buildings that yearn to sound like money (Trump Tower, The Sterling). There are buildings named for socks (Argyle House), for country clubs (The Pinehurst, Congressional), for English authors (Byron, Boswell, Carlyle), and for schools (Amherst, Barnard, Cambridge). There are buildings that sound like places fox hunters might live (Hardenbrook House, Hadley Arms). And buildings that conjure airy and vaguely European dreamscapes (Azure, Cielo, Beau Rivage).

Until now, to the best of our knowledge, no building in the city had ever been named after an international terrorist organization. But that became the unfortunate fate of Isis, a 19-story condo at 303 E. 77th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that was completed in 2010 and named after the Egyptian goddess of fertility.

But with the recent rise of ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), the condo’s board of managers realized they had a branding problem. And so, according to a former board member who was not involved in the vote, the Isis board recently voted to scrap the Egyptian goddess name with the terrorist associations and instead go with the less evocative but far safer 303 E. 77th Street.

It could have been worse. The Isis could have been known as the Bin Laden.