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Watch Trump Plaza implode in Atlantic City

2021-02-17T15:38:00-05:00

It was not the biggest or the best implosion ever. An auction for the right to detonate the dynamite to begin the implosion of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, N.J., fizzled. [...] The tower came down shortly after 9 a.m. amid a huge cloud of dust and an eruption of cheers.

Opened in 1984, Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino was the first of Donald Trump's three casino ventures in Atlantic City. All three ultimately went out of business, and while the former Trump Taj Mahal and Trump Marina Hotel Casino found new owners, it was the literal end for the Trump Plaza building today.

The auction that was originally announced to blow up the building was later canceled by building owner and billionaire investor Carl C. Icahn. The proceeds would have gone to the Boys & Girls Club of Atlantic City.

Atlantic City to auction off the opportunity to blow up Trump Plaza Casino

2020-12-17T15:28:00-05:00

The demolition of the former Trump Plaza casino will become a fundraiser to benefit the Boys & Girls Club of Atlantic City that the mayor hopes will raise in excess of $1 million Opened in 1984, Trump’s former casino was closed in 2014 and has fallen into such a state of disrepair that demolition work began earlier this year. The remainder of the structure will be dynamited on Jan. 29.

Get in line.

Brian Rose documents the vestiges of Trump's Atlantic City

2019-04-19T15:51:00-04:00

When Donald Trump opened the towering Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City in March 1990, he declared it “the eighth wonder of the world” and joined in the celebrations at a launch ceremony filled with portly actors dressed as genies brandishing tacky golden lamps. When photographer Brian Rose arrived in the city in 2016, the bankrupt Taj was practically empty. His images of the building’s exterior look eerily quiet, as if all its workers had left in a sudden hurry...

New Jersey's Atlantic City has rarely risen to the ranks of glitz and glamor attributed to other gambling cities. "The difference between Las Vegas and Atlantic City," the comedian Drew Carey said, "is the difference between getting conned by a beautiful call girl and getting mugged by a crack head."

Atlantic City’s former Revel casino. Photograph: Brian Rose

The photographs recently presented of the city by Brian Rose confirm this identity through an emphasis on the monumental failure of Donald Trump Taj Mahal Casino and other blights in its short history. Of Rose's photograph of the now abandoned building, The Guadian's Thomas Hobbs writes that "[its] exterior look[s] eerily quiet, as if all its workers had left in a sudden hurry, with what was once a thriving casino now unkempt and surrounded by damaged sand dunes."

Taj Mahal Elephant, sculpted by Michael MacLeod. Photo by Brian Rose.

After photographing the city in 2016, Rose has reflected on its current condition as a metaphor f...

Donald Trump, usher of America's postindustrial urban blight

2016-08-05T18:10:00-04:00

Casinos like the Taj Mahal have destroyed Atlantic City’s public space. Gambling’s arrival replaced the outward-looking hotels, shops, and promenades of the mid-century boardwalk with clusters of dark, labyrinthine resorts, set back from the street and enclosed behind monitored security gates. [...] Atlantic City’s model of a plush, self-contained casino abutting a ruined neighborhood has become a synecdoche for the last forty years of American urban development.

To dissect the urban effects of Trump's Atlantic City casino, Sam Wetherall traces the city's history as a booming resort town through the early 20th century, and into its current economic crisis:

In 2014 alone, casino closures cost Atlantic City more than ten thousand jobs, a staggering figure for a city with a population under forty thousand. Atlantic City’s unemployment rate sits at almost 14 percent, and it suffers from the highest home foreclosure rates in the country.

Donald Trump may herald a radical new force in American politics, but his background illuminates trends that have been unfolding in American cities for more than fifty years. As deindustrialization hollowed out cities’ economies, many have responded by wrapping their public spaces in glittering property developments and legalizing gambling to survive.

Atlantic City provides a potent, and foreboding, example of the kind of urbanity that Trump's business agenda has wrought:

While the media has dissected the failures of...

Moscow, Russia voted world's unfriendliest city by travelers

2015-09-02T14:33:00-04:00

We suspect the city’s notoriously bad traffic and general “aloofness” of the people contributed to its low ranking, as well as its culinary scene, which was also ranked dead last in this year’s poll.

When Travel + Leisure compiled a survey of the places its readers love to visit, it also collected data on the 30 locales they loathe. While Moscow, Russia tops the list of the world's unfriendliest cities, a significant number of the top 10 are located in the United States (including Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Las Vegas and the world's #2 unfriendliest burg, Atlantic City).

Atlantic City boardwalk collapse as Hurricane Sandy slams coast

2012-10-30T13:19:00-04:00

According to police, the famed boardwalk's north end is collapsing.This is happening while wave heights 100 miles off the coast of New Jersey are likely to hit 30 feet or more.