It is one of the ineffaceable facts, and one of the saving graces, of architecture in New York that a building of only middling formal success can still impose itself as an urban artifact. This rule is especially pertinent to Trump Place, a complex that will eventually comprise 16 buildings on the far West Side of Manhattan, between 59th and 72nd streets.

The dozen buildings now in existence are to one degree or another historicist essays that invoke a range of styles, from Beaux Arts to the early days of Modernism. Some of the buildings are better than others; none is great and none, mercifully, is downright awful. Now, after nine years of constant building, the home stretch is near, and we can assess the overall achievement.

On the whole, Trump Place is a significant, though not an unqualified, success. The mere fact that there is something there, rather than nothing, is an accomplishment, given the difficulties involved in getting anything built in Manhattan. But beyond that, the buildings, taken together, merge into a fairly persuasive architectonic community, fully contrived, to be sure, but sufficiently effective all the same.

It was the intention of the developers (Mr. Trump mainly leant his name to the project after he sold the land) to transfer the skyline of Central Park West to the Hudson River. Now it is worth observing in this connection that the skyline of Central Park West differs fundamentally from that of Fifth Avenue, which faces it across the park.There are far older buildings on the West side than on Fifth Avenue, where most date from the 1920s or ’30s and, in their collectivity, are somewhat boring. The charm of Central Park West, by contrast, consists in the variety of shapes and styles of its buildings, most conspicuously the twin towers of the Majestic, the San Remo, and the Eldorado, a typology that is all but unique to this one avenue.It is precisely that variety, a natural evolution on Central Park West, that the developers of Trump Place have artificially engrafted onto the Hudson. The premeditation is everywhere evident, and there seems to have been little effort to conceal it.

Structurally, the Trump Place buildings are similar to the older ones on Central Park West, since the principles of construction have not changed fundamentally over the past century: They consist of skeletal frames over which a skin of various claddings has been thrown. Surely the new buildings are as solid and stable as they need to be — as solid and stable, probably, as those on Central Park West. But a number of them have, from the exterior, a slapdash air of value engineering that feels unsatisfactory and immaterial. The besetting sin of such Neo-Preo buildings, as I once called them — that is, new buildings that seek to re-create the aura and prestige of pre-war buildings — is that they rarely achieve that immemorial presence, that effortless sense of solidity the buildings on Central Park West possessed from the start.

One notable exception is the newest and northernmost building at Trump Place, the Heritage, at 240 Riverside Boulevard.Though this building’s base curves grandly into 72nd Street, it is not, from the exterior, quite as distinguished as 220 Riverside Boulevard, immediately to its south. But it shares with that slightly older building a stone cladding that, as you stand there at street level, really feels convincing. Especially with its massive, wrought iron canopy on 72nd Street, it succeeds in looking as stodgily established as any other building on the island of Manhattan.As you step inside, past the epauletted doormen, the design of the interior seems especially sumptuous and tasteful and fully commensurate to the most plutocratic dreams of the upper-middle-class New Yorkers who happily inhabit it. Let it also be said that 71st Street, looking east from Riverside Boulevard, flanked as it is by these two new stone-clad structures, is one of the most improbably charming streetscapes in the city.

Trump Place, the newest building complex in New York, is fundamentally different from all the others.There is little of the social idealism that inspired MetLife, some 60 years ago, to build Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, or that moved the Port Authority, starting about a generation ago, to construct Battery Park City. The pure dictates of real estate have determined the genesis of Trump Place. As a result, there appears to be little attempt to foster among the inhabitants the sort of community identity that you find in Battery Park City. In this, it more closely resembles Park or Fifth avenues.

But it differs crucially in that it is largely cut off from the rest of the city — by a wall of ugly postwar projects on West End to the east and by the West Side Highway and the Hudson to the west.A few stores dot the streets east of Riverside Boulevard, but they are too small and insufficient to provide any sense of a vibrant and organic street life. For that the inhabitants of Trump Place have to go to West End Avenue or even Broadway.

The West Side highway itself is a constant presence that weaves its way nearer to and farther from Trump Place as it descends the West Side. For much of the length of the complex, it stays several hundred feet to the west. But at 72nd Street, precisely at the Heritage building, it comes very close, indeed, and threatens to explode the gentrified dreams of the inhabitants.

Three things serve partially to palliate this eyesore. One is the beautiful new park that stands between Trump Place and the Hudson.The second is the Hudson itself, which is reassuming its importance in the collective psyche of Manhattanites, after being denied for almost two generations. And finally, there is an improbable affection for massive infrastructure, for the essential urbanness it implies, that may redeem even the West Side Highway in the eyes of those who are now rushing to take up residence in Trump Place.

jgardner@nysun.com