“Mike Pence just called,” Small joked, “and he’s not going to stop the implosion.”īut even the satisfaction of seeing Trump Plaza end with a bang could not take away the pain still felt by local contractors who were burned by Trump’s business practices. Minutes before the tower fell, Small addressed a small crowd of politicians, union laborers and auction winners during a breakfast event right across the Boardwalk from Trump Plaza.
While Mayor Small swears the demolition was not about politics, he was not above throwing a few jabs at the former president. To Loizeaux, he sees his services as a way to help the city usher in a “rebirth” of an outmoded and outdated building. He doesn’t understand the hoopla over the fact that Trump used to own the Plaza tower.
His résumé also includes the Hacienda Hotel, Sheldon Adelson’s Sands Hotel, the Landmark and the Dunes in Las Vegas. Loizeaux, whose father started the business in 1947, has felled many buildings in Atlantic City: the Traymore Hotel in 1972, the Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel in 1979, the King David Hotel in 1998 and the Sands Hotel in 2008. “We don’t blow structures up,” he explains. A few hours after the implosion, Loizeaux is standing on the corner of Pacific and Missouri Avenues, wearing a white hard hat and covered in a layer of dust. “The day went exactly as planned,” says Mark Loizeaux, president Controlled Demolition, Inc., the company that brought the tower down to earth today. It hosted fellow billionaire Vince McMahon’s Wrestlemania IV and V and dozens of boxing matches, including Mike Tyson’s famous 1988 bout against Michael Spinks, whom he knocked out in one minute and nine seconds.īoom town: Louis Woloszyn prepares for the final countdown of Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. Trump Plaza was ideally located at the end of Atlantic City Expressway-in the middle of the Boardwalk-making it an instant entertainment hub and destination. Yet, the Trump Era also coincided with the best of times for Atlantic City. “But he eventually squandered all of it.” “He started off with a lot of goodwill,” Heneghan says. “Mike Pence just called,” Atlantic City Mayor Marty Small joked, “and he’s not going to stop the implosion.”ĭan Heneghan, who covered the opening of every casino in Atlantic City while he worked as a reporter for the Press of Atlantic City, says Trump came bringing a lot of jobs and hope to the Boardwalk. (The Taj Mahal closed in 2016 year and is now a Hard Rock Casino Trump Marina is now the Golden Nugget.) He resigned from the company in 2009, and Carl Icahn, who was a bondholder, bought the company out of bankruptcy in 2016.
TRUMP TOWER HOTEL SERIES
Trump took Trump Plaza public on the New York Stock Exchange in 1995, and by 2004, through a series of maneuvers and self-dealing, he had made more than $200 million while the company, which came to own his Taj Mahal and the Trump Marina, lost $647 million and declared bankruptcy. This money wasn’t going to be gambled at the tables-it went to Donald Trump so he could pay interest payments on a loan. That same year, Fred, Trump’s father, sent a lawyer to the Taj in Atlantic City to purchase $3.5 million in chips. “The possibility of a complete financial collapse of the Trump Organization is not out of the question.” , one New Jersey regulator said at the time that the would-be president’s business was in a precarious position. As Forbes senior editor Dan Alexander writes in his book about Trump, White House, Inc. To fund his vision of opulence in Atlantic City, which eventually included the Taj Mahal, which opened in 1990 and the Trump Marina, which was first dubbed Trump Castle and opened in 1985, Trump raised $675 million in bonds.īy 1990, the Trump Organization had amassed $3.4 billion in debt, straining the entire company. In 1984, Donald Trump opened the Trump Plaza, which at the time was a joint operation with Harrah’s running the casino. Ringmaster: In the early years of Trump Plaza, Donald Trump (with Sugar Ray Leonard and Don King) hosted many heavyweight fights as well as two WrestleManias.
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