12-17-2020
Atlantic City offers chance to blow up shuttered Trump Plaza casino.
Atlantic City will auction off the right to press the button
to implode a former Trump casino, all in the name of a good cause.
The Trump Plaza, closed since 2014, was President Donald Trump’s
first property in the US coastal gambling town in
which he came to own several properties.
The former casino, which opened in 1984,
has undergone little to no maintenance since shuttering,
and on several occasions during storms,
pieces of its exterior have fallen
onto the seaside promenade that runs alongside the building.
Since 2016, the two-building complex has belonged to
billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who was one of
Trump’s main Atlantic City financiers.
In mid-June, Atlantic City Mayor Marty Small announced the
building’s demolition, after taking legal action over
what he considered to be a danger to residents.
On Wednesday the mayor announced that the right
to press the button triggering the building’s
January 29 implosion will be auctioned to benefit the
youth organization Boys & Girls Club of Atlantic City.
“Now is the time to end an era and replace it with something new,”
said New Jersey-based Bodnar’s Auction.
Icahn has not said what he will do with
the land once the building is destroyed.
Trump had already filed a lawsuit in 2014 asking that
his name be removed from the building’s facade,
believing that its presence there was
bad for the Trump name and brand.
The former real estate developer has owned up to four casinos
in the northeast gambling capital:
apart from Trump Plaza there was also
Trump World’s Fair which closed in 1999,
Trump Marina which was sold by creditors in 2011,
and the Trump Taj Mahal which closed in 2016.
The subsidiary that ran the president’s Atlantic City properties,
Trump Entertainment Resorts, filed for bankruptcy three times,
in 2004, 2009 and 2014, weighed down by debt each time.
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