“That was clear as a bell here,” said Ilene F. Goldstein (left), the bankruptcy trustee who had been appointed by a United States Bankruptcy Court to liquidate the assets of Marina City Associates, the limited partnership led by E. Trine Starnes, Jr. “You can tell by the numbers – with the real estate taxes, with the secured debt, and with the Commonwealth Edison [bill]. And there obviously were other bills but they paled by comparison to the big three.”

Starnes had borrowed $25 million from Continental Savings Associates in 1983. He used $11.6 million of that money to purchase the commercial property and had a mortgage of $12.5 million. But when the renovation ran into financial problems, Marina City Associates fell behind on mortgage payments. The amount due on November 21, 1990, with interest, attorneys’ fees, and other costs, was $23.5 million.

There had been some interest in developing the property, recalled Goldstein, but as the real estate and travel industries crashed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the only interest came from what Goldstein called “the bottom feeders.”

Scavengers who wanted to buy the property for a very low price, she said, “probably were the only hope because the property needed so much money just to bring it up to any type of a livable arrangement.”

Among the businesses interested in Marina City, according to Goldstein, were casinos. There were no casinos in Chicago at the time, she explained, and the only way you could have a casino is to build it over water. Conveniently, much of Marina City was built over a marina.

“There was some level of interest of buyers who though they didn’t come out and say it, were kind of kicking the tires to see if they could get a casino there. That doesn’t come out in any of the papers. But the casinos in those days, it wasn’t really something that I wanted to see or that anyone would want to see happening where there were people living.”

Still, they were motivated sellers. The amount of debt, said Goldstein, was “tremendous.” The problem would be fixed either through litigation or agreements. But it would take time.

When Resolution Trust Corporation, the latest agency to manage the assets of Marina City Associates, asked Goldstein to abandon her interest in the property – the death knell of any other creditor’s hope of ever getting paid – she refused. The foreclosure went ahead, Goldstein continued to serve as trustee, and the commercial property languished for another few years.