The Vera Coking house was a boarding house owned by a retired homeowner in Atlantic City, New Jersey that was the focus of an eminent domain case involving Donald Trump in the 1990s. It was sold and demolished in 2014.
The Vera Coking house was a boarding house owned by a retired homeowner in Atlantic City, New Jersey that was the focus of an eminent domain case involving Donald Trump in the 1990s. It was sold and demolished in 2014.
In 1961, Vera Coking and her husband bought the property at 127 South Columbia Place as a summertime retreat for $20,000. [1]
In the 1970s, Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione offered Coking $1 million ($5 million in 2023) [2] for her property in order to build the Penthouse Boardwalk Hotel and Casino. She declined the offer, and Guccione started construction of the hotel-casino in 1978 around the Coking house, but ran out of money in 1980 and construction stopped. The steel framework structure was finally torn down in 1993. [3]
In 1993, Donald Trump bought several lots around his Atlantic City casino and hotel, intending to build a parking lot designed for limousines. [4] Coking, who had lived in her house at that time for 32 years, refused to sell. As a result, the city condemned her house, using the power of eminent domain. She was offered $251,000, [5] a quarter of what she was offered by Guccione 10 years earlier.
With the assistance of the Institute for Justice, Coking fought the local authorities and eventually prevailed. [6] Superior Court Judge Richard Williams ruled that because there were "no limits" on what Trump could do with the property, the plan to take Coking's property did not meet the test of law. But Williams' ruling did not reject the practice of using eminent domain to take private property from one individual and transferring it to another, which was eventually upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States in Kelo v. City of New London .
Two other properties that prevailed against eminent domain eventually did sell: Sabatini's restaurant received $2.1 million and a pawnshop sold for $1.6 million. Their lots became part of a large lawn flanking a taxi stand for Trump's casino. [1] [7] Coking remained in her house until 2010, when she moved to a retirement home in the San Francisco Bay Area near her daughter and grandchildren.
Property records show that on June 2, 2010, Coking transferred ownership of the house to her daughter, who put it on the market in 2011 with an initial asking price of $5 million. [1] [8] By September 2013, the price had been reduced to $1 million. [9]
The property was finally sold for $583,000 in an auction on July 31, 2014. [10] The buyer was Carl Icahn, who held the debt on Trump Entertainment, owner of Trump Plaza. He subsequently demolished the house on November 19, 2014. [11] Neither the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority nor the owners of Trump Plaza expressed any interest in the auction. [1]
The adjacent Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, the property for which Trump wanted Coking's property to begin with, closed in September 2014 for lack of business and was demolished on February 17, 2021. [12] [13] [14]
Penthouse is a men's magazine founded by Bob Guccione and published by Los Angeles–based Penthouse World Media, LLC. It combines urban lifestyle articles and softcore pornographic pictures of women that, in the 1990s, evolved into hardcore pornographic pictures of women.
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Robert Charles Joseph Edward Sabatini Guccione was an American photographer and publisher. He founded the adult magazine Penthouse in 1965. This was aimed at competing with Hugh Hefner's Playboy, but with more explicit erotic content, a special style of soft-focus photography, and in-depth reporting of government corruption scandals and the art world. By 1982 Guccione was listed in the Forbes 400 wealth list, and owned one of the biggest mansions in Manhattan. However, he made some extravagant investments that failed, and the growth of free online pornography in the 1990s greatly diminished his market. In 2003, Guccione's publishers filed for bankruptcy and he resigned as chairman.
The Institute for Justice (IJ) is a libertarian non-profit public interest law firm in the United States. It has litigated ten cases before the United States Supreme Court dealing with eminent domain, interstate commerce, public financing for elections, school vouchers, tax credits for private school tuition, civil asset forfeiture, and residency requirements for liquor license. The organization was founded on September 3, 1991. As of 2023, it employed a staff of 157 full-time staff members in Arlington, Virginia and seven offices across the United States.
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