One of Atlantic City’s Most Famous Empty Lots Is for Sale

The former site of the Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City is back on the market.

A listing for the shuttered Trump Plaza property at 2201 Boardwalk was placed on September 16th on the commercial real estate site Crexi. No asking price is given for the site.

According to the listing agents, the property is almost 1.2 million square feet and sits on valuable New Jersey oceanfront property.

Rainforest Cafe and B&B Parking are partial tenants on the property, on the now-vacant lot where the Trump Plaza Casino stood before it was imploded on Feb. 17, 2021.

Trump Plaza was one of four Atlantic City casinos to close in 2014, along with the Atlantic Club Casino Hotel, Revel Casino, now Ocean Casino Resort, and Showboat Casino Hotel, now open as a hotel with a 120,000-square-foot waterpark.

The Property is Owned By Carl Icahn

The former Trump Plaza property is owned by a subsidiary company of billionaire investor Carl Icahn, whose company unsuccessfully listed the site in 2023.

Icahn is well remembered in AC for having owned Tropicana Casino for about a decade, and acquiring Trump Entertainment Resorts in 2016 and taking it through Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Icahn then closed Trump Taj Mahal later that year after a long, contentious strike by United Here Local 54, Atlantic City's largest casino workers' union.

The property was sold and reopened as Hard Rock Hotel and Casino Atlantic City in 2018.

Remembering Trump Plaza

Trump Plaza, which opened in 1984, was the first of three hotel casinos owned and operated by President Donald Trump in Atlantic City, and was considered by many as the finest Trump-owned casino.

Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino boasted 60,000 square feet of casino, with more than 600 hotel rooms.

The building also became host to celebrities, concerts, and heavyweight prize fights — as well as the WrestleMania events in the late 1980s.

A partial list of celebrities who visited Trump Plaza in its prime includes Mohummad Ali, Warren Beauty, Mick Jagger, and Keith Richards, Barbara Streisand and Don Johnson, Jack Nicholson, Oprah Winfrey, Madonna and Sean Penn.

By the early 90s, however, the hotel casino was over $500 million in debt and declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In 2009, Trump gave up control of the casino, although it continued to use his name until it closed in 2104.