Photo of the home of Vera Coking, a widowed retired boardinghouse owner, who refused to sell her three-story boardinghouse despite pressure from Donald Trump and city officials.
For more than thirty years, a retired widowed retired boardinghouse owner Vera Coking had lived quietly in a three-storey clapboard house just off the Atlantic City Boardwalk. Her home, at 127 South Columbia Place, wasn’t much to look at: white paint peeling, lace curtains faded by sea air, but it was hers. She and her husband had bought it back in 1961 for $20,000 as a seaside retreat. To Vera, it was more than property; it was memory, family, and the simple satisfaction of owning something she loved.
In the late 1970s, Atlantic City was booming. Casinos were rising like glittering towers, promising fortune and spectacle. Vera’s modest house happened to sit in a prime location, just a short walk from the Boardwalk. Developers came knocking, but Vera wasn’t interested.
Her first test came from Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione, who was building the Penthouse Boardwalk Hotel and Casino. He offered Vera $1 million for her house, about $5 million in today’s money. She turned him down flat.
When she refused, Guccione didn’t back down. Instead, he literally built around her house, erecting steel framework that loomed over Vera’s roof like a giant cage. The sight of her small home surrounded by beams and girders became a local curiosity, an early “holdout house” story long before that phrase became internet-famous. But Guccione’s empire ran out of money in 1980, and the half-finished casino was left to rust. The skeleton stayed for over a decade until it was finally torn down in 1993. Through it all, Vera remained. “I loved my home,” she would later say. And she meant it.
Enter Donald Trump By the early 1990s, Donald Trump had become Atlantic City’s golden boy, or at least, he liked to think so. His name was plastered on hotels and casinos, and his Trump Plaza towered just next door to Vera’s little house.
Trump wanted to build a parking lot for limousines next to his casino to serve his high-rolling guests. Several property owners nearby agreed to sell. But Vera, along with a couple of other holdouts, refused. She had lived there for over three decades by then. She wasn’t going anywhere.
Trump, of course, wasn’t used to hearing the word no. As Ivanka Trump once put it, introducing her father at a campaign rally years later: “Donald Trump doesn’t take no for an answer.”
Trump personally visited Vera’s home to persuade her to sell. He tried charm, small talk, even gifts, once offering her tickets to a Neil Diamond concert. Vera famously told reporters later, “I didn’t even knonow who Neil Diamond was.”
When the soft approach failed, Trump took another route: legal pressure.
When Trump began expanding his Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino nearby, he offered to buy her property so he could tear it down and build a parking lot for limousines serving his high-roller guests. Coking refused to sell, turning down offers reportedly as high as $1 million.
Trump turned to a powerful ally, the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority (CRDA), a state agency created to channel casino profits into public and private projects that supposedly benefited New Jersey. By law, 1.25% of all casino gross revenue went to the CRDA, funding everything from housing to road projects. But the agency also wielded a controversial tool: eminent domain. Eminent domain, rooted in the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, allows the government to take private property for public use, provided the owner is given “just compensation.”
Over time, the definition of “public use” had broadened, sometimes including private developments deemed to serve the public good.In the early 1990s, the New Jersey Casino Reinvestment Development Authority (CRDA) attempted to use eminent domain to seize her house and transfer the land to Trump, arguing it would serve a public benefit.
In Trump’s case, the CRDA offered Vera $250,000 for her home, just a quarter of what Guccione had offered her ten years earlier. When she refused, the CRDA filed to seize her property in court. The plan was simple: bulldoze Vera’s house and turn it into a parking lot for Trump Plaza limos.
Trump defended his actions by painting Vera as a greedy obstacle. “This is a tough, cunning, crafty person who has purposely allowed this property to go to hell, right at the foot of the entrance to Atlantic City so that she can get a higher price,” he said at the time.
Vera’s response was sharper. She called Trump “a maggot, cockroach, and crumb.”
"If Trump's thinking I'm gonna die tomorrow, he's having himself a pipe dream," she said then. "I'm gonna be here for a long, long time. I'll stay just to see he's not getting my house. We'll be going to his funeral, you can count on that."
Words that reflected a force that seemed to disregard her humanity.
Peter Banin and his brother owned another building on the block. A few months after they paid $500,000 to purchase the building for a pawn shop, CRDA offered them $174,000 and told them to leave the property. A Russian immigrant, Banin said: “I knew they could do this in Russia, but not here. I would understand if they needed it for an airport runway, but for a casino?”
Public outrage followed and Coking fought back with help from public-interest lawyers, while her small white home, wedged defiantly between rising steel frames of Trump Plaza became a national symbol of resistance to corporate and government overreach.
In 1998, after a lengthy legal battle, Coking’s persistence bore fruit. The New Jersey Superior Court ruled in her favor, blocking the CRDA from seizing her home through eminent domain, declaring the action an overreach that did not meet the standards of public use and preserving her right to stay. The decision was heralded as a landmark victory for property rights, an assertion that government powers could not be wielded to serve private ambitions alone. The New York Post celebrated the decision with the headline: “TRUMPED!”
Vera’s battle had not just been in the courts. Accounts detail a steady campaign of intimidation. City officials, reportedly spurred by Trump’s influence, conducted frequent visits under the guise of inspections or appraisals. Every knock at her door was a reminder of her defiance and the power arrayed against her. During the construction and demolition around her property, workers allegedly damaged her home. At one point, they even started a fire in her attic. Vera sued Trump and the demolition company for the damage and settled for $90,000.
To many, Vera Coking’s story became emblematic of the fight against the unchecked influence of corporate power and the misuse of eminent domain. Her battle exposed a darker side to Trump’s ambitions, a side that used influence and pressure against a single, determined woman. The case resurfaced during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, with politicians like Jeb Bush citing her story to criticize Trump’s stance on property rights.
Today, Vera Coking’s defiance stands as a reminder of what it means to resist intimidation when the stakes are deeply personal.Her fight became a symbol of ordinary people standing up against the misuse of power, especially the kind that disguises private gain as public good.
Her court victory also underscored that property rights are about more than just money; they symbolize memory, identity, and the right to make choices free from coercion. Against the backdrop of corporate ambitions, her story remains a quiet but potent testament to resilience.
The casino boom eventually began to fade, and Trump’s empire wasn’t immune. His properties went bankrupt multiple times, and by the late 1990s, his flashy reputation had dimmed in the city that once embraced him.
Long after Trump’s casino closed, Vera simply stayed put. Her house became something of a local landmark, a stubborn reminder of resistance amid the city’s garish sprawl. Tourists would stop and point, marvelling at the tiny home that defied the billionaire next door.
Her victory, though satisfying, was bittersweet. Atlantic City was no longer the neighborhood she had cherished. In 2014, at 91, Coking moved to California to be near family, leaving the home she had defended so fiercely. Her house sold for $530,000—a figure that barely mattered in the face of her prolonged struggle.“It was never about the money,” she said. “I loved my home.” The building was soon demolished, erasing one of the city’s last physical connections to its past.
Vera Coking passed away quietly in California, far from the Boardwalk she once fought to protect. Remembered as a folk hero who refused to be bullied against powerful forces, developers, government agencies, and a thorn in the side of a future president.
Let's not forget either that Trumps actions have always been about himself, an arrogant individual who does not give a damn about the feelings of anyone else, unless they serve his own interests.
