Watch the Trump Era in Atlantic City End With 3,000 Sticks of Dynamite

The implosion of what was once the premier gaming destination in Atlantic City came less than a month after its best-known former owner, Donald J. Trump, left the White House after losing re-election and became the first president in history to be impeached twice. He was acquitted on Saturday of inciting the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.

The tower came down shortly after 9 a.m. amid a huge cloud of dust and an eruption of cheers.

“It’s an end of a not-so-great era,” said Jennifer Owen, 50, who bid $575 to win a front-row seat at a V.I.P. breakfast in an oceanfront pavilion with a direct view of the implosion.

Ms. Owen, who lived in Atlantic City for decades before moving two years ago to Rochester, N.Y., said she was not a fan of Mr. Trump and was eager to say goodbye to the skyscraper that once bore his name.

“It’s symbolic for sure,” she said. “Him. Everything ending.”

Roy M. Foster, president of the Atlantic and Cape May Counties Central Labor Council, said the event was bittersweet.

“It’s a good day. It’s a bad day,” he said. “A lot of us worked on that building.”

Trump Plaza was the first of three casinos Mr. Trump owned before his gambling businesses in Atlantic City cratered and went bankrupt for good, leaving a trail of unpaid contractors and suppliers — and a bad taste for the Trump brand in this struggling city of 38,000.

To detractors, including the Democratic mayor, Marty Small, Wednesday’s demolition was the vivid embodiment of a long-awaited end.

“This is not about President Trump, because, quite frankly, the people here in the great city of Atlantic City knew how the presidency was going to play out on a national stage because we’re one of the cities that knew him best,” Mr. Small said after the implosion.

As he campaigned for the Republican nomination for president in 2016, Mr. Trump frequently boasted about how he outwitted Wall Street lenders and rode the value of his name to riches in Atlantic City.

“The money I took out of there was incredible,” he once told an interviewer.

In fact, he used little of his own money, a New York Times investigation found, and he shifted personal debts to the casinos, leaving the burden of his failures on investors and others who had gambled on his success.

“His tenure here ended horribly,” Mr. Small said in an interview last month.