Trump Plaza Casino Deemed Public Safety Hazard, Set To Implode Days After Joe Biden’s Inauguration
Donald Trump’s presidency appears to be coming to an end on January 20, and his once-famous casino will be toppled just a few days later.
As Newsweek reported, the Trump Plaza Casino tower in Atlantic City, New Jersey, is scheduled for implosion on January 29 after the city had deemed the structure a “public safety hazard.” The building itself was closed in 2014, and the property has been owned by billionaire developer Carl Icahn since 2016, the report noted.
The report added that the site had long been the center of controversy for the Manhattan real estate mogul, with his financial difficulties tied in with the property.
“Trump Organization bankruptcies dating back as far as 1992 plagued the operation with financial troubles for years and city officials said the increasingly dilapidated property had become an eyesore,” the report noted. “Citing disrepair, Trump in 2014 sued Trump Entertainment Resorts, which he no longer controlled, and demanded to have his name removed from the Trump Plaza building.”
Officials determined that it was a safety hazard, Newsweek added, and some officials had proposed putting fencing around the perimeter to keep pedestrians out of the range of falling debris as the structure itself began to fall apart.
Though he once had a significant presence in Atlantic City, the destruction of the casino will bring down his last major venture there. As The Inquisitr noted, his foray into gambling was long seen as one of his biggest business flops. His Trump Hotel & Casino Resorts filed for bankruptcy three separate times, in 2004, 2009, and again in 2014, in part due to the onset of the global financial crisis.
The ventures were also the target of political attacks. During the 2016 presidential race, the Republican candidate was accused of failing to pay hundreds of contractors who worked on the casinos. J. Michael Diehl wrote in a story for the Philadelphia Inquirer that Trump ordered several grand and upright pianos for his then-new Taj Mahal, but claimed he never followed through in paying the $100,000 contract and instead sent a letter saying the company was short on funds and could only pay 70 percent.
The building is set to come down just a little more than a week after Trump’s time in the White House comes to an apparent end. Major news networks called the 2020 presidential race in favor of Joe Biden this weekend as the Democratic candidate moved into what is believed to be an insurmountable lead in the state of Pennsylvania, putting him over the 270 electoral vote threshold to make him the apparent winner of the race.
In New Jersey, home to the soon-to-be-demolished casino, Biden was leading by 18 points with 80 percent of the expected votes counted, a lead that could grow larger as mail-in and absentee ballots continue to be counted.
