COMMENTARY: Casino agency abuses eminent domain
“It is a case right out of Central Casting: the arrogant state agency that is abusing its power of eminent domain to take the family home of underdog Charlie Birnbaum, a local piano tuner who has deep roots to the property.
Charlie’s home is a 1921 three-story walk-up apartment building within sight of the ocean and Atlantic City’s famed boardwalk. Here Charlie and his brother grew up with his parents, Holocaust survivors who met while hiding from the Nazis in their native Poland. Here Charlie visited and cared for his aging parents. His father passed away in 1987. In 1998 his mother, then 86, was brutally beaten to death in the family home. Charlie, a piano prodigy who played with the Philadelphia Orchestra at 13 and a professional piano tuner for the casino industry, dealt with the tragedy by restoring the ground-floor apartment as a piano studio devoted to the memory of his parents.
“And that’s why this property has meant so much,” Charlie told Forbes Magazine. “It was my therapy.””
Westover, Craig. Courier-Post 16 August 2014.