Vorinostat in Treating Patients With Locally Recurrent or Metastatic Cancer of the Urothelium

Inclusion Criteria: * Patients must have a pathological diagnosis of transitional cell carcinoma of the bladder or urothelium with less than 25% component of other cell types such as small cell, neuroendocrine or squamous cell carcinoma; archival tumor tissue must be available for classification and correlates as described in this protocol or otherwise the patient must be willing to undergo biopsy prior to trial entry * Patients must have measurable disease, defined as at least one lesion that can be accurately measured in at least one dimension (longest diameter to be recorded) as \>= 20 mm with conventional techniques or as \>= 10 mm with spiral CT scan; patients with boney metastases are allowed to participate in the study provided they also have non-osseous disease that is measurable * Patients must have recurred or progressed on or subsequent to platinum-based chemotherapy in the adjuvant or advanced setting; patients treated with a second line of chemotherapy may be included provided more than six months elapsed from the completion of the first line of chemotherapy to the start of the second; patients may have had any number of prior intravesical therapies for superficial bladder cancer; patients may also have had one experimental biologic therapy for their metastatic urothelial cancer provided this was not an agent known to act through histone deacetylation or demethylation; these compounds include sodium butyrate, trichostatin A (TSA), trapoxin (TPX), MS-27-275 and d…