Everybody seemed to be carrying a mattress.
The first one I saw was under the arm of a young woman who was struggling to get what looked like a full mattress to her vehicle. Behind her was her male companion, who was also heaving. They stopped right in front of me to straighten the mattresses under their arms so they could proceed.
As I stood in line waiting to go into the remains of the Trump Taj Mahal (only a certain number of us were allowed to go in at a time), I watched as two men balanced a queen mattress over their heads as they headed to an SUV parked where luxury limos and Mercedes had once driven up to disembark guests. Soon, they returned with the box springs.
I was at the shuttered Atlantic City casino-hotel yesterday, four days after it reopened for a 60-day liquidation sale of its contents. We were allowed on floors 39 to 50, with only two elevators until a third was finally put into operation. The casino floor itself was off-limits.
We entered the hotel after only a 20-minute wait (days before people had stood in line for up to two hours). We were ushered to a spot in the lobby where an official of National Content Liquidators of Ohio, which is overseeing the sale, stood in front of hotel items marked with prices and lot numbers. We were told to note the prices because not all of the items were tagged in the rooms upstairs.
The Taj Mahal was closed in October after a very long run plagued by bankruptcy, a switch in ownership and union issues. Donald Trump spent $1.2 billion building the Taj Mahal and opened it in 1990 amid much fanfare, with Michael Jackson joining in the festivities. Trump filed for bankruptcy a year later, and billionaire Carl Icahn took it over.
The hotel was 4.2 million square feet, with 3,000 slots, 2,000 guest rooms and ornate chandeliers picked out by Trump and his then-wife Ivana in Austria that cost $15 million. (Humongous crystal chandeliers in the lobby of the hotel were priced at $7,500 each for the sale.) The hotel was purchased earlier this year by Hard Rock International, owned by the Seminole Indians of Florida, who plan to reopen it next year as a casino-hotel.
My auction buddy Janet and I started on the 39th floor of the Taj Mahal because that was one of two additional floors opened up that day. I figured there would be more to see in rooms that had not yet been pilfered. The rooms and hallways were dim, much more so than the bright lobby floor where folks paid for their purchases.
Some of the furnishings in the rooms were still intact, but in disarray. Left were some cushioned side chairs, beds with and without mattresses, some draperies, lamps and headboards.
In one hallway were store-bought prints stacked against a table under a sign warning buyers not to remove electrical fixtures. The prints were popular, though, because I saw several people carrying them, sometimes more than one. Folks were also carrying small items such as lamps from floor to floor. A man on the elevator had snagged an electric fireplace from one of the luxury suites for $85.
There were no luxurious items on this floor (or the 49th floor, which I visited). Those had likely been sold the first day.
The National Liquidators man had noted that there were suites at either end of several hallways, so I had to check those out on the 39th floor. One end suite was almost empty except for a few chairs – one of which I liked but it lacked enough cushioning – and a king bed whose mattress was up against a wall. The bathroom counter of black marble was still intact, as well as a bidet in the toilet area and the Jacuzzi tub.
The best thing about the room was its wonderful view of the ocean. The worst was the mold on the back of wallpaper piled on the floor that had been torn from the walls. At the other end of the hallway, a pungent odor – likely the musty smell of mold – filled the air.
On the elevator to the 49th floor, the operator warned me that there wasn’t much there, except a lot of broken items. I didn’t find anything broken, but the floor was almost deserted because there was not much left to take. It was among the floors opened on the previous days of the sale.
I found suites along the hallway and a more spacious suite – with a view of the ocean and sunbathers, fireplace and bar – at the left end of the hallway. I found mold in many of the rooms on this floor.
When the Taj Mahal first opened, Trump the showman had called it the “eighth wonder of the world.” Not so on this day. It could be called the most unhealthiest place to be. I don’t believe I was in any room long enough for exposure to mold spores to affect me. According to the CDC, mold can cause health problems or maybe not. If your immune system is compromised or you have a chronic lung disease, the CDC suggests that you stay away from environments with mold. It can grow in carpet, fabric and upholstery, among other things.
I wondered about those folks with the mattresses, draperies and pillows (Janet saw lots of people with those two items as she sat in the lobby near the elevators). How could they remove mold from them, just in case spores had latched on to these articles? There are a lot of tips on the web on how to eliminate mold, including airing out the items in the sun before using them. That’s exactly what I’d do.
Here’s a sampling of what I found on my visit to the Taj Mahal:
