The beginning of a new series of photographs. Donald Trump's failed casinos and the devastation connected to those failures. A state and city that sold its soul to criminal interests under the pretense of urban revitalization. A Disney theme park with street crime, homelessness and unemployment, and the money laundering schemes of billionaires.
The closure of the sprawling Boardwalk casino, with its soaring domes, minarets and towers built to mimic the famed Indian historic site, cost nearly 3,000 workers their jobs, bringing the total jobs lost by Atlantic City casino closings to 11,000 since 2014. Atlantic City now has seven casinos.
AP - The Big Story
Now, 26 years later, I look back and reflect on my personal journey and Trump’s promise of greatness. I see now that the opulence and glamour were all just bait. His rhetoric was supported by majestic surroundings, but they were financed through junk bonds. The profits that Donald Trump enjoyed were not reinvested in the building or the employees. They were shipped back up to the shore to Wall Street. That casino money flowed right out of Atlantic City and into the coffers of the billionaire hedge fund owners.
Refinery 29
A wall with a discreet no trespassing sign blocks passage to a stairway into the now abandoned Trump realm.
On the north end of the Boardwalk just beyond the abandoned Trump Taj Mahal, Governor Chris Christie’s tax payer supported mega project.
Two years later, the Revel is shuttered — wiping out thousands of jobs amid an economic implosion of the gambling industry here. Rather than serve as a shining example of Christie’s economic stewardship, Revel now stands as a 57-story example of failure in a city that has bedeviled New Jersey governors for decades.
The Washington Post
Parking garage and drifting sand. There are degrees of sadness in things, but there is something especially poignant about an empty 57 story casino hotel with a vast unused parking garage. The garage was designed to inject gamblers directly into the maw of the casino without ever having to interact with the surrounding city.
At the far end of the boardwalk, past a line of squat, peeling buildings, there’s no missing it. The tall glass tower of Revel, Atlantic City’s latest hotel-casino, reflects the sky and sea, and a steady stream of cars turn off Pacific Avenue to enter the parking garage. That 7,739-car garage* is larger than the sum of all parking garages in the city of Philadelphia, but that’s just one clue of what’s to come inside of the mega-resort.
-- Huffington Post
I found myself— America finds itself now — at the very end of the Boardwalk. The very end of this immigrant’s midway lined with cheap thrills and junk concessions, pulsating with tawdry neon and clamoring moronically. The end of this corny, schmaltzy Trumpian thoroughfare that entertains us with its patter and enthralls us with its lies.
Down at the Boardwalk’s terminus, by Oriental Avenue, by night, the seagulls keep flying into the Revel and dying. Or they flap and limp around a bit before dying. You never see or hear the impact, you just get what happens after. Immense white gulls, flapping, limping, expiring. They fly into the Revel’s giant vacant tower of panes and break their necks, because without any lights on, the glass is indistinguishable from the sky.
Joshua Cohen, n+1 Magazine
I made my second trip to Atlantic City. It was a grey, damp, December day — chilly, but not too bad. The project is beginning to take shape. I will focus, to start, on the Trump Taj Mahal and Trump Plaza, two recently bankrupted casinos that have sent this already depressed city reeling, and then gradually expand out from the Boardwalk. Is Atlantic City a metaphor for what is happening to the country as a whole?
Way back in 1981, Louis Malle said that his film Atlantic City “could be a metaphor for things going wrong all over America.” And recently the New Republic opined that “The closure of Trump Taj Mahal casino is a giant metaphor for Trump’s America.” So, I think we are on solid, if not original, footing here.
Driving down on the Garden State Parkway I pulled into a rest stop for coffee, and as I was leaving I noticed Governor Chris Christie’s beaming face lurking behind a couple of coin operated games. Politico called Christie and Trump “the twin villains of Atlantic city,” and I am in constant amazement that these two buffoons have come to exercise such power.
Fortunately, it appears that Christie’s path to national acclaim has fallen victim to a traffic jam in Fort Lee, an act of political vengeance stunning for its clownish and petty nature. Ah well.
“Trump and Christie have one thing in common regarding Atlantic City,” says Frank Becktel, a jitney driver and an Atlantic City loyalist suffering along with the rest of the town in its hour of need. “They both knew how to squeeze a buck out of us and leave us for dead.”
Politico
In 1984 Donald Trump opened the Trump Plaza, at the time the largest casino in Atlantic City. The project was done in a partnership with Harrah’s, an experienced casino operator, and involved a great deal of debt, which Trump was forced to refinance several times.
“Early on, I took a lot of money out of the casinos with the financings and the things we do,” he said in a recent interview. “Atlantic City was a very good cash cow for me for a long time.”
-- The New York Times
When Trump Plaza closed two years ago, over a thousand people were laid off. The buildings languished, and the embarrassment of having the Trump name in bold red letters all over exteriors prompted a lawsuit.
Last year, he sued to force the shuttered Trump Plaza to remove every reference to his name, a final pronouncement on his view of Atlantic City. The letters were removed, some carted off in a contractor’s pickup truck.
-- Politico
Trump’s wall in Atlantic City.
(Reuben) Kramer shows us the shuttered Trump Plaza, which will likely be torn down. It is one of four casinos that closed in 2014, representing a third of Atlantic City’s gaming halls. Trump’s name has been removed from the Trump Plaza facade. Only the gaudy golden crest, a color reminiscent of Trump’s famous hair, remains.
WNYC News
I’ll tell you, it’s big business. If there is one word to describe Atlantic City, it’s big business. Or two words – big business.
Donald Trump
During Prohibition, Atlantic City created the idea of the speakeasy, which turned into nightclubs and that extraordinary political complexity and corruption coming out of New Jersey at the time. The long hand that they had-and maybe still do-even had to do with presidential elections.
Martin Scorsese
When asked about Atlantic City, Trump says the iconic resort town is “a disaster” that collapsed just before his timely exit, which is surely true. In the town on which the Monopoly game was based, riches did not trickle down. Many inhabitants are not passing Go: 39,000 people live in a city where unemployment is 13.8 percent, the 10th highest in the nation, and the mortgage foreclosure rate is America’s highest.
Trump has been vigorously spinning his companies’ bankruptcies as evidence of his business acumen. “I had the good sense, and I’ve gotten a lot of credit in the financial pages—seven years ago, I left Atlantic City before it totally cratered,” he boasted in the first GOP primary debate. “And I made a lot of money in Atlantic City, and I’m very proud of it.”
Newsweek
(Republican mayor) Guardian said: “If we go bankrupt, it’s because the governor will drive us into bankruptcy. It will not be an Atlantic City bankruptcy, it will be a (Republican governor) Christie bankruptcy.”
Philly.com
I walked out on the beach opposite Ceasar’s and the Playground Pier (originally the Million Dollar Pier), and took several pictures of the huge wall of signs attached to the troubled mall. A new investor recently bought the highly leveraged pier for $2.5 million and hopes to attract a younger crowd of shoppers.
At my feet in the sand I picked up a cigarette carton with Russian lettering on it. I thought reflexively, “The Russians are coming!” But the Russians are already here.
Russian pop diva and Eurovision stalwart Philipp Kirkorov has revealed that he is a supporter of Donald Trump. In an interview with BBC News, the “You Are the Only One” songwriter spoke of his long friendship with the American presidential candidate, and his hope for closer relations between Russia and the United States.
Kirkorov, who represented Russia at Eurovision in 1995, first met Trump in 1994 when Kirkorov and his now ex-wife and Russia’s 1997 Eurovision singer Alla Pugacheva performed at the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City.
wiwibloggs.com
The pier extends well into the surf, and on this damp and gloomy day, the waves crashed and swelled around the supporting columns.
Benjamin Strauss, a sea level expert at Climate Central, an organization of scientists, says that people in Atlantic City are uniquely vulnerable to rising seas because they inhabit a barrier island with extremely low and flat terrain.
In January of 2016, after a winter storm flooded parts of the Jersey coastline, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, then a candidate for president, sarcastically asked whether he should “pick up a mop” to help with flooding—a remark that was criticized by environmentalists for being out of touch with the gravity of the situation. Christie accepts that human activity contributes to climate change, but contends that the issue “is not a crisis.”
National Geographic
When people show you who they are, believe them. Donald Trump made a bad gamble in my community, devastating thousands of American citizens. In his own mind, of course, he was a success. In May, Trump told the New York Times about his 25 years in Atlantic City: “The money I took out of there was incredible.”
It’s the only thing he has to say of my now-destroyed home town. He came, he took and he left. And I hate to break it to you, America — he’s not coming back for us.
The Washington Post
Trump Plaza and the three other casinos he once owned are now shuttered, but his presence hovers over everything here in Atlantic City. To such an extent, that one group wants to build a Trump museum.
As an example of the possible impact of a museum, Fox pointed to Sevnica, Slovenia, the birthplace of first-lady-to-be Melania Trump. Since the election, people have been flocking to the town to get a glimpse of where she grew up.
“This is something that could drive people to the city,” Fox said. “You look at what is happening in Melania’s hometown, and why couldn’t that happen here?”
Press of Atlantic City
By the time I get back to Atlantic City, these images of Trump Taj Mahal and Trump Plaza will almost certainly be gone. Workmen were busy removing any signs of Trump’s involvement in Atlantic City when I was there less than two weeks ago. But the evidence will not be easily erased.
In 2015, the Trump Taj Mahal was fined $10 million for money laundering.
Trump Taj Mahal received many warnings about its deficiencies,” said FinCEN Director Jennifer Shaky Calvery. “Like all casinos in this country, Trump Taj Mahal has a duty to help protect our financial system from being exploited by criminals, terrorists, and other bad actors. Far from meeting these expectation, poor compliance practices, over many years, left the casino and our financial system unacceptably exposed.
Financial Crimes Enforcement Network
United States Department of the Treasury
Press release — March 6, 2015
The Trump Taj Mahal appears from the boardwalk as a complex multi-leveled building festooned with towers, domes, and a grand staircase leading up to the sky. The reality, however, as seen along Pennsylvania Avenue — the Monopoly Pennsylvania Avenue that is, not Washington, D.C. — is a massive windowless box containing cavernous casino, restaurant, and entertainment spaces. Everything is internalized. Only the high rise hotel rooms offer views of the ocean and the New Jersey pine barrens to the west.
As I walked along the wall of the Taj casino I came across the abandoned Human Resources Offices of Trump Entertainment Resorts. No jobs available here any more. Lots of smiling faces of fictional employees — and a dead pigeon.
And then, to my astonishment, a group of women came walking along Pennsylvania Avenue carrying “Make America Great Again” signs. Even here, at the epicenter of Trump’s business dissolution, at the nexus of Russian dirty money and the fleecing of gullible gamblers, there are, apparently, true believers.
Atlantic City has seen five of its 12 casinos close since 2014 (two were Trump casinos) amid ever-increasing competition from gambling halls in neighboring states. That has caused the city’s tax base to crumble. It also led the city’s remaining casinos to file hefty tax appeals, claiming their property assessments were too high thanks to the downturn. In turn, that blew large holes into the city’s budget over the last few years, helping bring the city to the brink of bankruptcy.
NJ.com
So, in a nutshell, the Borgata, the newest and most successful of all the casinos, bankrupted Atlantic City. It should be obvious at this point that the casinos were never really about the revitalization of the city. Atlantic City’s unemployment rate remains astronomically high, and city services have declined. The casinos were, and are, about the transfer of billions of dollars into the pockets of people like Donald Trump, aided by politicians like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. And there is ample evidence that much of Trump’s money came from nefarious Russian sources to whom he remains indebted and obligated in unknown and dangerous ways.
Donald Trump came to Atlantic City promising glamor and untold riches. He left it in ruins — though there is still plenty of gold all over the city — like in the Gold Mine directly behind the empty and now de-Trumped Taj Mahal.
Now baby everything dies baby that’s a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back
Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City
Atlantic City, by Bruce Springsteen
