No doubt the folks at Rubenstein Associates (who also reps us!) did a little work tidying up their desks, and doing some product placement here and there, but here's a small find: Donald Trump Jr., it appears, is a fan of Portfolio! That's the December/January issue, peeking out at the edge of the desk. And even though there's a caption that assures there are copies of The Journal, The Times and the Post, we don't see them, but we sure do see that Michael Lewis cover story.

Unfortunately, Eric Trump couldn't make it—he's in Mexico on official Trump business—but the beautiful Ivanka, clad in black and white with sparkling peep-toe pumps, and her brother Don Jr. were there to announce the big news: New York has become too small a playground for these growing Trumps. With Pappa Trump's approving nod, the children announced the expansion of the Trump Hotel Collection into the rest of the world.

Whether the rest of the world is ready or not.

The site of the press conference was appropriate—the 10-year-old Trump International Hotel and Tower at the base of Central Park West was the first Trump Hotel to hit the streets of New York, and has set a precedent for what's to come.

By 2010, hotels with the Trump name are scheduled to pop up in Chicago, Las Vegas, Fort Lauderdale, Hawaii, Central America, Toronto, Scotland, and Dubai. And keeping up the tradition in New York will, of course, be Trump SoHo—the development whose height has inspired the protests of locals in the neighborhood.

Plans for the new hotel brand can give New Yorkers a sense of what's growing in their own backyard. Ms. Trump stressed personalized services such as an Attaché that remembers customers' preferences and spa treatments named by the Trumps themselves. Still, the hotels will not all resemble one another.

"SoHo's going to have a completely different attitude," Jim Petrus, the chief operating officer at Trump International Hotels Management said. "We want SoHo to feel like it's SoHo." He stressed that the Trump Hotels would be a brand, not a chain.

"It's all going to be about luxury, but we want to be sure that it definitely fits into a SoHo environment," he added.

The guest demographics at the new developments will be similar to those at Trump International, Mr. Petrus said, citing an average age range of 35 to 55, with an average household income of more than $400,000.

The Trump children said they have been involved in most steps of the planning for these projects, including designing uniforms for employees and jumping on beds to test mattresses.

"I want to thank our father for letting us be a part of this brand," Don Jr. said.

It turns out that Bill Rudin is one of Senator Hillary Clinton's biggest bundlers—he's a bona fide Hillraiser, in fact. And Don Trump Jr. bundles for former Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Alex Sapir, 26, tumbled onto the New York City real-estate radar a year ago in March, taking the reins of his father Tamir’s real-estate empire as president of the Sapir Organization. Donald Trump Jr., 29, became executive vice president of development and acquisitions at the Trump Organization in 2004.

The project that they’re spearheading together, the Trump SoHo Hotel Condominium New York, is scheduled for a 2009 opening in Hudson Square—an area of Manhattan, if there ever was one, sorely in need of the touch of cool that only the moneyed young rich could provide. It’s in Soho, but not of Soho; instead, it’s a warehouse and loft district littered with empty storefronts and vacant office buildings.

“We want it to be the most iconic building in all of downtown and possibly in New York City,” Mr. Sapir told The Observer from his Mercedes, just returning to Manhattan from a vacation in Miami.

Mr. Trump, who has adapted over the last few years the workaholic habits of his father, said that Mr. Sapir’s a good listener. “He understands that we’re all young in this industry, and we need to be open to other people’s opinions,” Mr. Trump told The Observer. “We’re all working together to make sure it’s a true five-star downtown hotel.”

The 413-unit condo-hotel hybrid, one of only a handful in Manhattan, will offer 360-degree views of the city and beyond.

Assuming it gets built.

Controversy has dogged the Trump SoHo seemingly from its inception, leaving Mr. Sapir and Mr. Trump, whom one mutual intimate described as “socially friendly” but not necessarily friends, a stern task as they step further into the spotlight turned on by their fathers.

Developers announced the project last spring as a “transient hotel,” where well-heeled guests can buy one of the luxury rooms. In November, the developers obtained a building permit for the project in the low-rise manufacturing zone without public review, sparking criticism from city officials and preservationists.

Although transient hotels are legal in manufacturing districts, critics say the “guests” will be more like “residents,” living in the hotel year-round. Opponents of the tower, including Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, U.S. Representative Jerrold Nadler and State Senator Tom Duane, have urged the city to enforce a stricter review of these projects, arguing that developers will be scouting manufacturing zones for sites to build towering condo-hotels masquerading as Trojan-horse transient hotels.

Although the city’s Planning Department is examining the complaints, changing the zoning laws will be a lengthy process, leaving Mr. Sapir and Mr. Trump space to muscle forward.

Right now, the Trump SoHo looks to be in limbo, with excavation at the site at Varick and Spring streets underway but construction still lacking. The city continues to review whether it’s more “condo” and less “hotel”—and, therefore, illegal.

Last week, after stepping out of a meeting with interior designer David Rockwell of the Rockwell Group, Mr. Sapir said that he’s working tirelessly on the building’s “timeless luxury,” poring over details until the early-morning hours in his Tribeca home.

“He has a very good feel for luxury,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Sapir. (Bayrock, an investment firm, is also involved in the Trump SoHo’s development, along with the Sapir and Trump organizations.) “He understands it and has a vision of what he wants to achieve in the look, and ultimately what the clients are going to see and feel.”

While Mr. Sapir is passionate about woods and fabrics, Mr. Trump’s forte is the business side.

“He is able to bring practicality and a level head to what could seem to be a difficult task,” Mr. Sapir said. “I think it has shown, from working together, that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. His father has really helped shape his personality in business—and so has mine.”

Tamir (Tom) Sapir cultivated an image as an eccentric risk-taker: a Soviet immigrant cab driver who opened an electronics store, invested in Russian oil, then renovated white-elephant office buildings during the 1990’s recession to assemble an impressive portfolio. Early last year, he bought the Duke Semans mansion on Fifth Avenue for $40 million, the highest price then for a New York townhouse.

The Sapir Organization now owns more than seven million square feet of Manhattan office space, including 100 Church Street and 2 Broadway.

“When people say ‘Sapir,’ I want it to be synonymous with a great landlord, a great developer and a great family,” Alex Sapir said. “I want us to be the most recognized name in real estate in the world.”

That honor (and burden), of course, now falls on the Trumps.

Growing an empire for decades, one with roots in Queens, Donald Trump Sr. has been the omniscient face of New York City real estate—fiery, swooping bangs, grin drenched in self-confidence, name in lights in the heavens—for at least the last 20 years, eliciting the sorts of love-hate emotions normally reserved for politicians and pro athletes.

His oldest son brings a new, slicked-back charm to the dynasty.

At 13, he got his first job as a dock attendant at the Trump Castle marina in Atlantic City, making minimum wage plus tips. In interviews, he describes a continual, intrinsic fascination with his father’s business; he joined the Trump Organization in 2001. He told Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph Magazine in 2005 that he inherited his father’s “natural security, or ego.”

“I can be my own person and not have to live under his shadow,” he told the magazine. “I look up to him in many ways—I’d like to be more like him in business—but I’m such a different person, it’s hard to compare us.”

Mr. Sapir said that he talks to his father “26 times a day,” but only on the phone, since Tamir Sapir doesn’t have an e-mail address. The elder Sapir is wintering in Mexico, working on a new villa development in Acapulco.

When Alex was old enough, he helped his father on weekends at the family electronics store near Madison Square Park. “I wasn’t the whiz kid making sales at age 9,” he said. “But just being there watching my father, you know—I was spending time with a brilliant person, and hopefully that rubs off.”

Meanwhile, Alex got his business-management degree from Fordham University and studied law at Middlesex University in the United Kingdom. “I had some other ideas, but real estate is what worked,” he said.

He worked with his father on SDS Investments L.L.C., a private-equity real-estate fund with property in New York, Las Vegas and Miami, before graduating to become president of the Sapir Organization on March 8 last year.

“We’re usually in sync, but people disagree sometimes, and father and son disagree more than most people do,” the younger Mr. Sapir said. “But you suck it up—I respect his opinion more than anyone else’s.”

But it’s others’ opinions that will matter in the long run, with the eyes of many in a notoriously unforgiving business watching to see if Mr. Sapir and Mr. Trump can douse Hudson Square with a little condo-hotel glam.

It sounds like Gioia's embracing the ideals (and cash) of Generation Engage, a non-profit co-founded by the young Rockefeller, and self-described as "a non-partisan effort aimed at raising the political profile of young adults."

For as little as $10 you too can mingle with these so-called next generation leaders and find out how often they day trip in Sunnyside.

—Nicole Brydson

Mr. Trump, 52, learned only recently that his ex-wife had laid claim to "The Donald" for her own use. He wasn't happy about it. "She doesn't have the right to use any name referring to me," Mr. Trump said. "Obviously, this was a reference to me. Look, as you can see, she tries to gain maximum advantage whenever she tries to use the name Trump."

A legal scholar took his side. "If she is using 'The Donald' and she says, 'What I really mean is my son,' I don't think she's going to get very far with that argument," said Hugh Hansen, a professor at the Fordham University School of Law and author of Intellectual Property Law and Policy .

Whether the developer is $2 billion in debt or riding high, the meaning of the Trump name remains the same. To pump its value, he has slapped it on the sides of airplanes and gaudy buildings, on billboards by the Lincoln Tunnel and on the covers of his various business memoirs ( Trump: The Art of the Deal ; Trump: The Art of the Comeback ). Either through clever marketing or his own need for media attention, he has made "Donald Trump" not so much a name for an actual human being, but a brand name.

At times he has tried to protect the value of his glorious surname by publicly sniping at his ex-wife's efforts to build her own empire with its help. But without her, Mr. Trump could become a fading property: Ivana is the one who, time and again, has kept the Trump soap opera alive, using her former husband and her 17-year-old daughter, the would-be supermodel Ivanka Trump, as key narrative devices. And without the soap opera, the name is worth nothing.

The battle for the rights to "The Donald" began with the Jan. 14 opening of Culture Club, a nightspot on Varick Street with a 1980's nostalgia theme. The place has waitresses dressed as Madonna wannabes and mixed drinks with names like the Smurf and the Rubik's Cube. The club's owners also planned drinks called "The Donald" (a Manhattan straight up), "Ivana" (a flute of Moët Champagne) and another one named for Mr. Trump's onetime mistress and eventual second wife, Marla Maples (champagne with peach schnapps). Ms. Trump's intellectual-property attorney got in the way of the nightclub's retro fun by insisting that the owners abandon the Donald and Ivana drinks and scrap the Trump Lounge it had built on the second floor.

On the club's opening night, a mural of Mr. Trump was left in darkness. "We'll be painting him over," said a publicist for the club, gesturing quickly.

Mrs. Trump, 49, said she filed for the rights to the phrase "The Donald" five years ago and added that she recently applied to re-register her expired claim. "It's for one reason," she said. "I have a son who is called Donald Jr., and I want to have and use it for his fragrance, as I did with Ivanka … It is the phrase which I have created and I trademarked it. I absolutely have no intention of using my ex, or making money off him."

But Ms. Trump, who was born in what is now the Czech Republic, is certainly moving closer to her former husband's traditional domains of real estate and gambling. She plans to open a lodge named Ivana Suites in Manhattan sometime in the next year and a half. Her casino in Dubrovnik, Croatia, is scheduled to open this summer. At both operations, she hopes to offer drinks named "The Ivana" and "The Donald." She also envisions a line of clothing bearing the name "The Donald." All this would be meant, supposedly, as a tribute to her son and would balance his account with that of his more-marketed sister, Ivanka.

Unlike his parents, Donald Trump Jr. wants nothing to do with the press, according to sources in the family and those who know him in college. He is a student at the undergraduate division of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. He is a fraternity member and goes by the name Don. He declined to comment for this story.

Mr. Trump sounded less than pleased with the notion that his son would be known by the nickname "The Donald." "I don't think Donny wants to be referred to as 'The Donald,'" he said. "And for good reason. I would very much like not to be referred to as 'The Donald.' I would like to do without it." (Never mind that the first sentence of Trump: The Art of the Comeback goes like this: "It's usually fun being The Donald.")

Mom, in contrast, sees the already-made name as too valuable a property. "He's coming out of the Wharton School of finance," she said, "and he wants to get involved in the business, and this is what I thought would be handy."

Aside from "The Donald," Mr. Trump also has a dim view of Ivana's tenacious hold on the Trump name. Said one Trump Organization insider: "She's not allowed to use the name Trump, but she really wants to." She was married, from 1995 to 1997, to Italian highway and airport designer Riccardo Mazzuchelli, but his name has not stuck to her. Even during that brief marriage, she went by Ivana Trump Mazzuchelli. A Trump source said Mr. Trump will not object to her using the Trump name "provided she uses it well." (Ms. Trump received $14 million, an apartment in Trump Plaza and a manse in Greenwich, Conn., in the couple's 1991 divorce.)

Mr. Trump's lead lawyer, Bernard Diamond, said he and his client both see nothing pure in Ivana's latest entrepreneurial efforts. "He's concerned, as we all are, that she seems to take great pleasure in exploiting his name and has done it for quite a long period of time everywhere," said Mr. Diamond. "I don't think he's prepared to sit there quietly and let her try to gain proprietary rights in the name 'The Donald.' Obviously any efforts to exploit that name would in fact be exploiting his name, and she has no right to do so." He said Ms. Trump's people would be notified by letter, with follow-up at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. "We're going to file for their application being filed and we'll contest at the appropriate time," he added.

Ms. Trump, oddly enough, has also lost her first name. In 1995, a trademark collector in England, Suleman Tahir, registered the name Ivana in hopes that she or someone else would want to buy it one day. (Mr. Tahir has also trademarked the names Santa Claus and Pocahontas, probably with quick paydays in mind.) "Within a month, I think I'm going to get my name in the U.K. back," Ms. Trump said. Her experience with Mr. Tahir partly explains her quick objection to the Culture Club's plan to use the Trump-related names. "The Culture Club, they meant it in a flattering way, I know–they didn't mean to harm anybody," said Ms. Trump.

Mr. Trump, it should be noted, is as zealous as his ex-wife in using legal means to protect the name. The tycoon owns rights to more than 60 different trademarks, including Taj Mahal and even the letter T. Technically, Mr. Trump controls only those lone T's plastered on his hotels or associated Trump paraphernalia. He also objected to the Culture Club's attempt to use the Trump-related names at their kitschy venue, with his lawyer sending a routine letter objecting to the idea.

The Culture Club decided not to put up a legal fight against the Trumps. One might think they could have mounted a defense based on "satire" or "parody." After all, there's no chance of mistaking the grungy place, with nostalgic pictures of E.T. and Adam Ant plastered everywhere, for a Trump property. But intellectual property lawyer Siegrun Kane said that, based on Federal court precedent, Culture Club would have had an uphill battle: "There's an Elvis case, in the Fifth Circuit, some nightclub was using Elvis Presley, the Velvet Elvis or something like that," Ms. Kane said. "And the Court didn't permit that."

Mr. Trump said he is not absolutely against his ex-wife making money off of "The Donald," however. "It would always be subject to my approval," he said. Presumably, the Trumps will soon be negotiating. If they can't agree, the erstwhile couple could end up before a trademark examiner, just as the Gallo wine family of California did after one estranged Gallo scion applied for a trademark for Gallo cheese. The examiner ruled that cheese was too similar a product to wine, and denied the heir's request.

Other celebrities have managed to finesse these little tributes. With its sandwiches, the Stage Deli has honored, without incident, 34 celebrities, including Evander Holyfield, Neve Campbell, Gloria Estefan and Rudy Giuliani. "If anyone had a problem, we'd take their name off it," said Stage owner Paul Zolenge. He has never consulted an intellectual-property lawyer.

Ivana claimed to have no sense that she was picking a fight: "I have no grudges against anybody," she said, "and I absolutely don't, specifically, applying to Donald Trump."

It wasn't clear if she was referring to Donald Trump, the man, or Donald Trump, the brand.

Additional reporting by Gabriel Snyder.

You can reach N.Y. Law by e-mail at mfleischer@observer.com.