Developer Eustace Mita has not made a formal proposal to any regulation body in Ocean City
OCEAN CITY – Eustace Mita’s Icona at Wonderland hotel-retail complex project faces numerous hurdles before it could become a reality.
The luxury developer from Ocean City who is behind the high-end Icona Resorts and Achristavest Fine Home Buildings has proposed building a 252-room hotel with 10 to 12 retail stores in the space occupied by the former Wonderland Pier amusement park at Sixth and Boardwalk.
He would spend between $135 million and $150 million on his project, have 375 parking spaces beneath the hotel and also have other amenities including an arcade, outdoor performance space and fire pits. He would keep Wonderland Pier’s century-old carousel and 140-foot-tall Ferris wheel on the south and north sides of the hotel.
To make his proposal work, he would like the city to create a redevelopment zone at the site. That would allow his project to go forward in spite of current zoning that requires amusements at the site, and he argues it also would allow for a payment in lieu of taxes that would generate about $1 million annually for the city. (He compares that to roughly $100,000 a year Wonderland paid in taxes, part of which went to the county and state.)
Although critics of the project suggest he has a quick and easy way to get what he wants, the process to make the former amusement park a redevelopment zone is a complicated process.
Mita has not presented a formal application to any regulating body in the resort, but he has been making the rounds pitching the proposal, first to members of Ocean City Council, then the Boardwalk Merchants Association and the latest to the public at a Third Ward meeting hosted by Councilman Jody Levchuk. That public meeting, at the Chris Maloney Lecture Hall at the Ocean City Free Public Library, drew an overflow, standing room only crowd Monday, Nov. 25, demonstrating keen interest – both positive and negative – from local residents. The meeting also drew a slew of media members, both local and from multiple Philadelphia TV news stations.
According to a memo to Ocean City Council from city solicitor Dorothy McCrosson, the process to get a project like Mita’s approved is lengthy.
The former Wonderland Pier site is in the “On Boardwalk” zone that does not permit either residential uses or a hotel/motel.
The On Boardwalk zone, she wrote to council, “is intended to reserve a portion of the Atlantic Ocean frontage exclusively for resort commercial and commercial recreational use adjacent to the Boardwalk from Sixth Street to 14th Street. This zone contains one of Ocean City’s major resort attractions, consisting of many small specialty shops, boutiques, restaurants, amusement and entertainment facilities abutting a sunlit planked promenade with an unobstructed ocean view, which encourages leisurely sitting, strolling, jogging and bicycling for pleasure, recreation and health.”
For Mita to get his hotel project approved, he would need “relief” from the zoning ordinance. She wrote that the most common relief is a use variance from the Zoning Board of Adjustment at a public hearing. The variance requires notice to property owners within 200 feet of the site and its approval can be appealed.
The method Mita is suggesting is having the property designated as an “Area in Need of Redevelopment or Rehabilitation.”
To do that is “a multi-step process,” McCrosson writes, that requires action from City Council and the Planning Board. That involves various resolutions and an ordinance adopting a redevelopment or rehabilitation plan and a resolution designating the area in need of rehabilitation or redevelopment.
After those resolutions, it would have to be reviewed and approved by the commissioner of the state Department of Community Affairs and opponents could appeal that decision to the Superior Court of New Jersey, according to the solicitor. She noted those processes were used at the 10th Street Marina and the Soleil property across from the historic Flanders Hotel at 11th and Boardwalk.
The 10th Street Marina was built and is operational, but the Soleil property remains only a concept. That site, where a major hotel was proposed, has remained vacant for more than a decade. Mita has said it did not come to fruition because banks would not finance the project.
In 2023, Mita proposed a hotel project similar to the Icona at Wonderland, but to be built on open city land between Carey Stadium and the boardwalk, between Fifth and Sixth streets. Ocean City Council panned the idea and it never went forward.
When the Sentinel polled members of council after Mita presented the Icona at Wonderland project to them in recent weeks, a number of them said they did not believe designating a redevelopment zone at the former Wonderland Pier site was appropriate given that it was an operating amusement park until it closed permanently in mid-October. They also raised concerns about putting a hotel on the site.
At the public presentation Nov. 25, some members of the public supported Mita’s Icona at Wonderland plan, but others criticized it. There is a group in the city, OCNJ History & Culture, that wants to keep an amusement park at the site. It is having a public presentation from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 30, at Tabernacle Baptist Church at the corner of West Avenue and Eighth Street.
Mita bought the former amusement park property during the COVID-19 pandemic early 2021 after a bank called in $8 million in loans on the owner, Mayor Jay Gillian, who was trying to refinance. Mita leased the park back to Gillian, who continued operating it through this past summer season, but in August he decided to close it permanently after deciding it was no longer a financially viable business.
Gillian’s Wonderland Pier was started by the mayor’s father, Roy Gillian, in 1965. The mayor’s grandfather, David Gillian, founded Gillian’s Fun Deck in 1929, where Roy worked until striking out on his own with Wonderland Pier. Jay took over the business, buying it from his father.
– By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
