With the assistance of the Institute for Justice, Coking fought the local authorities and eventually prevailed. She was offered $251,000, Ī quarter of what she was offered by Guccione 10 years earlier. As a result, the city condemned her house, using the power of eminent domain. Coking, who had lived in her house at that time for 32 years, refused to sell. In 1993, Donald Trump bought several lots around his Atlantic City casino and hotel, intending to build a parking lot designed for limousines. The steel framework structure was finally torn down in 1993.

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. In the 1970s, Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione offered Coking $1 million ($5 million in 2023) for her property in order to build the Penthouse Boardwalk Hotel and Casino.

In 1961, Vera Coking and her husband bought the property at 127 South Columbia Place as a summertime retreat for $20,000. History Coking house at 127 S Columbia Pl, between the steel framework of the planned Penthouse Casino photographed by Jack Boucher for Historic American Buildings Survey, c.1991 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.

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