10 floors are missing from Trump Tower

Everyone has heard of buildings replacing the 13th floor with the "14th floor" in the elevator to avoid superstitions. But what about skipping a whole 10 stories in order to give floors at the top a higher elevator number?

That is a move belonging to none other than the noted New York real estate mogul Donald Trump. The Trump Organization claims that Manhattan's Trump Tower rises 68 stories over Fifth Avenue, although databases such as the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats say the tower is only technically 58 stories tall.

"Developers have a tendency to exaggerate the floor count," Ben Mandel of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats told The Associated Press. Of course, there is a pretty simple solution to the dispute. If you want to stick to a number you can't inflate, go with the height: Trump Tower is an indisputable 664 feet tall.

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But as for the 10 extra stories, Trump told The New York Times in 2003 "it was all approved." "I brought it before the various agencies and got them to agree that I could start the [residential] building at Floor 30, because it equated to approximately 300 feet above the ground," Trump said. The lower commercial floors had tall ceilings, Trump claimed, which allowed him to skip 10 numbers in the elevator when designating the higher levels.

Still, some tenants were reportedly required to sign paperwork saying that their floors were actually lower than what was written on the button.