A spot on the Atlantic City Boardwalk where movie stars, athletes and rock stars used to party — and a future president honed his instincts for bravado and hype — was reduced to a dusty pile of rubble on Wednesday. The former Trump Plaza casino was imploded after falling into such disrepair that chunks of the building began peeling off and crashing to the ground. A series of loud explosions rocked the building around 9 a.m., and it started to collapse almost like a wave from back to front until it went straight down in a giant cloud of dust that enveloped the beach and Boardwalk. Overall, it took the structure less than 20 seconds to collapse. “I got chills,” Mayor Marty Small said. “This is a historic moment. It was exciting.” He estimated the remaining pile of rubble is about eight stories tall, and would be removed by June 10. Some of it could be used by environmentalists interested in building an artificial fishing reef off the coast of Atlantic City. Additional parts of the casino-hotel complex fronting on the Boardwalk and on Pacific Avenue, the main road along the row of casinos, were not included in the implosion. They will be demolished in the near future using heavy equipment, but not explosives. The removal of the one-time jewel of former President Donald Trump’s casino empire clears the way for a prime development opportunity on the middle of the Boardwalk, where the Plaza used to market itself as “Atlantic City’s centerpiece.” “The way we put Trump Plaza and the city of Atlantic City on the map for the whole world was really incredible,” said Bernie Dillon, the events manager for the casino from 1984 to 1991. “Everyone from Hulk Hogan to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, it was the whole gamut of personalities. One night before a Tyson fight I stopped dead in my tracks and looked about four rows in as the place was filling up, and there were two guys leaning in close and having a private conversation: Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty.” “It was like that a lot: You had Madonna and Sean Penn walking in, Barbra Streisand and Don Johnson, Muhammad Ali would be there, Oprah sitting with Donald ringside,” he recalled. “It was a special time. I’m sorry to see it go.” Though the former president built it, the building is now owned by a different billionaire, Carl Icahn, who acquired the two remaining Trump casinos in 2016 from the last of their many bankruptcies. Small proposed using the demolition as a fundraiser for the Boys And Girls Club of Atlantic City, and began an auction for the right to press the button that would bring the structure down. But Icahn — a donor and former special economic adviser to Trump — objected on safety and liability issues, and got the auction house to halt the bids. Icahn said he would replace the $175,000 that had already been bid with his own money. Opened in 1984, when Trump was a real estate developer in his pre-politics days, Trump Plaza was for a time the most successful casino in Atlantic City. It was the place to be when mega-events such as a Mike Tyson boxing match or a Rolling Stones concert was held next door […]
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