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Trump Taj Mahal opening in 1990: 'It's beautiful, but it's too large'

ATLANTIC CITY — If the Trump Taj Mahal is the Eighth Wonder of the World, getting room service must be the ninth.

This archived story originally was published April 5, 1990.

ATLANTIC CITY — If the Trump Taj Mahal is the Eighth Wonder of the World, getting room service must be the ninth.

Or maybe it's getting your room key to work, or getting decent water pressure on the 39th floor, or getting a slot machine that works, or maybe just finding your way around this Eighth Wonder.

"It's beautiful, but it's too large," said Lorraine Beaulieu, 49, who came from Bangor, Maine, for the opening this week. "If you come here for a few days, by the time you find your way around, it's time to go home."

>>> RELATED: Trump Taj Mahal to close after Labor Day

Complain. Complain. Complain. So what if the spa and health club and beauty salon and stores and child-care center won't open until June; if the cash machines don't all work; if the Safari Steak House didn't have lobster tails; if the Oasis Lounge didn't have banana daiquiris; if the casino opened six hours late on Tuesday; if my wife couldn't get her nails done. As Marc Levitt, a casino worker from Mount Laurel, explained, "it's hard to open up the Eighth Wonder of the World."

Rome wasn't built in a day, either. But Donald Trump didn't build Rome.

He did build the Taj.

He and his public-relations staff have released a barrage of promises: ''Your wish is our command. . . . Our wish is that your experience here be filled with magic and enchantment." Trump uses superlatives as if they were Kleenexes and he had a cold - make that pneumonia. But, hey, all I wanted from room service was a bowl of chocolate ice cream. I had to settle for chocolate chip.

More than 60,000 people a day have been wandering through the world's newest and reportedly largest casino this week to inspect the grandeur and the glitz, to check out the 3,000 slot machines and 167 gaming tables, to disappear into what Anne Bell, 73, of Elizabeth, N.J., called "a fairyland."

In fairness, most among the masses seemed to love the place - but often with a qualification.

"This place is gorgeous, beautiful," gushed Lee Pilarz, 70, of Deptford. ''I love the chandeliers."

She and her friend Alberta Gamble, 71, of Camden, were wandering around the casino floor.

"Can you help us?" Pilarz asked. "We're trying to find the Boardwalk. We don't know which way to go."

FORGET REALITY

That's the whole idea behind the Trump Taj - to make you forget you're in Atlantic City. The ocean is superfluous. The Taj is 4.2 million square feet, 17 acres, of self-contained, self-centered fantasy, a monument to escapism. It has its own helicopter landing pad, and Trump has his own fleet of 44-seat choppers.

"This is the only building in the world where you can buy an airline ticket to," said the building's architect, Francis Xavier Dumont.

"We're trying to make people walk in here," said Steve Bolson, a Trump vice president, "and believe this is an adult Disney World."

Outside, the structure is almost cartoonish - three football fields long fronting the Boardwalk, an essentially white building with scores of onion domes or minarets, most painted with candy-colored purple, pink, emerald green and gold stripes - colors, says the architect, "you find in ancient India."

Onion domes are the dominant theme inside as well, from bathroom fixtures and coffee creamers to tie clips.

Architect Dumont compares the Trump Taj with the great public spaces and palaces of the world. The entrance from Virginia Avenue, he says, "is modeled after the Champs Elysees" and "is equal to anything you'd see in the gateways of Europe."

Maybe. But with a bit more neon.

ENGLISH CARPETS

The lobby, the grand entrance hall, has $400,000 worth of carpets imported

from England. Seven chandeliers with Austrian crystal - costing $40,000, $250,000 or $2.2 million apiece, depending on which Trump employee you ask - hang in the lobby. Fresh flowers are flown in from Hawaii. Workers sponge plant leaves daily, fish cigarette butts out of ashtrays and smooth the sand. Scores of palm trees are better than real: Grown naturally in tropical regions all over the world, the palms are dipped in preservatives stem by stem, leaf by leaf, and reassembled.

"They will always stay perfect," said Tim Willard, whose company, Parker Interiors, maintains the casino's plants. "Nature can't do that."

Donald Trump can.

Drinks in the Oasis Lounge are served by women in harem costumes. Belly dancers jiggle around the lobbies; genies on stilts wander the wide halls and lobbies, asking you to rub their lamps. An Elvis impersonator walks around and tells you that his real idol is Clint Eastwood.

As Trump promised, the employees are happy. Doormen greet you in purple robes and turbans with feathers and fake rubies and a smile. "I'm a sultan's royal greeter," said Thomas Higgins of Long Island, who is paid $3.68 an hour to unload luggage. "I love it here. It's like a play. We're performing. It's just like being on stage every day."

Thomas P. Pippette of Broomall built the Taj for Trump. He traveled the world to do it, taking over the project in August 1988 and spending $400 million in just 15 months. He went to Marrakech, Morocco, to buy brass and bone mirrors, to a casbah in the Atlas Mountains of Africa to buy tapestries. He hunted down marble in the Far East, crystal in Germany. He flew to Burma and India for artwork and also to Italy, where all the marble was cut.

He sat in the Diamond Ballroom this week and waxed poetic, not just about the obvious treasures but also about the things you don't see - the sprinkler systems, the circuitry, the duct work.

"It is the Eighth Wonder of the World," he insisted, "because we have rolled a classical building into a gaming hall. There's no other like it in the world."

And Pippette gives all the credit to Trump.

"He's as great a man in our time as the builder of the original Taj, or the pyramids - like him or not," said Pippette. "No one else could have done this but Donald Trump."

The Eighth Wonder has 1,250 rooms, including 237 suites. It has 12 restaurants and enough space - according to the Trump machine - to accommodate 85 percent of the conventions in America. When it is complete, the Taj will have 20 stores, a Xanadu showroom, an arena with six skyboxes and enough versatility for circuses and hockey games, rock stars and car shows.

Room rates run from $140 to $200. The rooms are just rooms, with beds, carpets, cable TV, lots of mirrors and room safes. They also have "robobars" that are yet to be stocked. The beds are firm, the pillows soft and the temperature warm. Every bathroom has marble walls, and every patron should get - according to Asa Ige, one of the florists - a fresh flower at night. Mine never came.

The Raja and Lanai suites run from $350 to $600 a night. They have hot tubs and televisions that pop up at the foot of the bed. They have mirrored ceilings and beveled glass, fake elephant tusks by the beds, Jacuzzis, bars, wide-screen televisions and color schemes that range from black lacquer to Miami pastels.

But it is the 51st floor where decadence triumphs.

On this floor - really the 42d, but Trump omitted several lower numbers - are seven "theme" suites, ranging from $3,500 to $10,000 a night. Trump named them after his favorite historical figures: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Cleopatra, Tutankhamen, Napoleon, Kublai Khan.

THE GREAT SUITE

The Alexander the Great suite is the grandest, with 4,200 square feet. It has a marble foyer, a mural of Alexander, satin drapes, purple wool carpets with silver speckles, a baby grand piano, a servants' entrance, two bronze lions, a sauna, a steam room, three Jacuzzis, a massage table, two bedrooms, three endlessly marbled bathrooms, a bar, two giant-screen televisions and a compact-disc player.

"When I'm up here, I feel like I'm on top of Mount Olympus," said Dumont.

Imagine, for a moment, yourself soaking in the Jacuzzi in the master bedroom. It is encased in marble, surrounded by six Greek columns, lighted by three crystal chandeliers. A replica of a Botticelli is on the ceiling. While you are soaking, floor-to-ceiling windows provide a panoramic view - of burned-out buildings.

"Unfortunately, we overlook Atlantic City," said Dumont. "But Atlantic City is changing for the better."

Of course, most of those who flooded the Taj this week will never see the Alexander the Great Suite. They come to enjoy the lavish public spaces, to gamble, to bask in the glow of Donald Trump.

"It's sensational. It's magnificent opulence," said Ben Roeshman of Penn Wynne, there with his wife, Marilyn. "You almost feel you should be charged for just walking in. . . . When you come in here, there are no troubles in the world. You relax, have a chance to participate in the good life."

A LONG TREK

Not everyone, however, was enjoying the good life. One elderly couple from Gloucester, Mass., took the bus down in time for the grand opening. The man was in a wheelchair.

"We've been going from floor to floor, up and down - and pushing him - ahhhhhhh," said the woman, her voice trailing off in disgust. "Nothing's organized. Three rooms we've tried and the keys never work. We should have waited a few weeks."

The most confusion, however, was on the casino floor, where many slot machines jammed. At others, players who hit the jackpot had to wait for payment.

"I've been waiting an hour and 15 minutes to get paid," said Carol Raymond, 30, of Turnersville, Monday afternoon. "That's ridiculous. I won $55 (on the nickel machine), and you got to wait to get paid. And you can't play the machine in the meantime."

Raymond recently returned from the Mirage Casino in Las Vegas.

"This is beautiful," she said of the Taj. "The Mirage is another world. It's got a rain forest inside. And when you go to the registration desk, they got white sharks swimming around in tanks. And they got volcanoes outside that erupt twice a night."