She once called Donald Trump “a maggot, a cockroach and a crumb.” This week, he remembered her as “an impossible person.” The woman who became a folk hero for resisting decades-long efforts by big-name developers like Trump to displace her Atlantic City boardinghouse is now 86 and has sold.
The 29-room property Vera Coking and her husband bought for $20,000 in 1961 and fought to hold onto went at auction Thursday afternoon for $530,000 plus 10 percent commission, said Joshua Olshin of AuctionAdvisors, which handled the sale. Bidding started at $199,000, priced to sell in Atlantic City’s depressed real estate market.
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Coking has moved to California to be near her family amid a long-running saga that has paralleled the rise and fall of Atlantic City’s real estate fortunes. The now-vacant property had been listed for $995,000 since September, and the decision to auction was made by Coking’s family after they could not find a buyer, said Oren Klein of AuctionAdvisors.
The winning bidder is a local real estate person who wishes to remain anonymous, Olshin said.
The road to the auction block has been circuitous. Coking first took on Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione in the 1970s, who was reportedly so angered by her refusal to sell that he started building his casino above and around her property.
Trump, who bought Guccione’s unfinished project, also tried to buy Coking’s building to tear it down and use the land for his Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino. Coking battled with Trump and prevailed in a 1998 state Supreme Court case that blocked attempts by the state to use eminent domain to condemn the property.
Coking’s one-woman battle was closely followed in the press and by the people of Atlantic City, where she and her property, sitting defiantly in the shadow of Trump’s casino, have been a familiar sight for decades.
The portrait of Coking as a principled holdout is wrong, Trump said, asserting she had been willing to sell but that they could never agree on a price.
“She could have lived happily ever after in Palm Beach, Florida; instead, she was an impossible person to deal with,” Trump said this week. In addition to millions of dollars, he said, he had offered Coking housing for the rest of her life in one of his properties.
Coking’s grandson, Ed Casey, previously told the Press of Atlantic City that it wasn’t true his grandmother had once been offered millions. He said she wasn’t opposed to selling but was proud to live in and fight for her longtime home.
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