The Butcher's Lament.

A FEW months ago, the brothers Darryl and Stuart Romanoff, owners of a row of 1930s market buildings on West 13th Street, revealed plans to build a 250-foot office tower on the site. Preservationists were not pleased. Although the buildings are not exactly pretty, their clean, straight lines and casement windows evoke the Art Deco era in which they were built. And like many buildings in the meatpacking district, they boast distinctive metal canopies that stretch over the sidewalk, so as to shield butchers' wares from the sun. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]