Owner provides tour of Wonderland, points to collapsing wall
OCEAN CITY — During a tour of his Wonderland Pier property Friday morning, Sept. 18, owner Eustace Mita said the deteriorating conditions will mean the iconic Ferris wheel will be demolished soon.
Mita is a few months into negotiations with Ocean City Council over what type of development he can put at 600 Boardwalk. Council in June designated the property as “an area in need of rehabilitation.”
Mita requested that designation more than a year ago as a step toward building a hotel in the On-Boardwalk Zone that does not allow hotels.
Council members have not revealed where they are in the negotiations taking place out of the public’s view, but have said whatever is built to replace the former amusement park will be their plan, taking into consideration concerns of a wide range of stakeholders.
The community has been split over the future of the property ever since amusement park owner Jay Gillian closed the park after selling the property to Mita in early 2021. Gillian leased the park back and ran the amusements through the summer of 2024 before announcing Wonderland would close for good because it was no longer financially viable.
The rides went dark in mid-October 2024 after a final fall weekend that saw large crowds of nostalgic people coming in for a last chance to use their tickets and enjoy rides that entertained families for almost 60 years. Many took the opportunity to ride the historic carousel and try to grab the brass rings to take away as souvenirs.
Nostalgia, however, made way for controversy in the nearly two years since the park closed. What rides remain have been silent since then.
With a lawsuit pending trying to overturn council’s rehabilitation designation and advocacy groups calling for more transparency from council on their visions for the property, the Sentinel contacted Mita last week for a status update.
Mita invited the newspaper for a brief tour of the property behind the boardwalk building where the bulk of the amusement park once stood, but is now mostly vacant.
Mita, who owns Icona Resorts with a number of high-end hotels in Cape May County and is a luxury-home developer through his Achristavest Fine Home Builders, clearly provided the tour to emphasize the need to do something quickly with the site.
Critics have asserted that he has allowed the property to deteriorate, something they argue other boardwalk property owners could do to follow suit to break with zoning and develop their own properties, although that possibility has been up for debate.
Deteriorating conditions had been apparent before; in one instance a contractor working on the Ferris wheel was killed in May 2022 when the wheel of an aerial lift he was on broke through the surface near the ride, causing the accident.
The deterioration is more pronounced now.
“Literally, the back of Wonderland is imploding,” Mita said last week.
“Literally it’s falling into itself. The police called me yesterday and said the log flume is blowing water all over.” Noting the ride had been closed for a long time, he added, “So pipes are bursting. I mean, it’s brutal.”
Mita showed the cracks in the surface of the park, but pointed to a major concrete block retaining wall under the raised deck that is collapsing. The deck appears to be buckling.
Surveying the mostly empty space, Mita said, “This looks like a graveyard now.”
He added that the cracks in the cement foundations haven’t reached the Ferris wheel or the log flume that abuts Wayne Avenue at the back of the boardwalk property.
“The urgency from a safety factor just went up tenfold because I never expected (this much deterioration) since we’re not operating the park, and that means there have been no people walking on it. And so you have no people, yet it’s imploded. That tells us the structure is not sound even with no pedestrian traffic and certainly not sound with any rides because it’s imploding without anything on it,” Mita said.
“As you can see, it’s (the concrete) cracked, I don’t know, 30 feet from the Ferris wheel, so that will be the next stop from what the engineers say.”
Because that is the tallest structure at 144 feet, collapsing “would be the worst nightmare, so the demolition just got a lot more urgent,” he said. “We were going to wait and now the engineers are telling me that we can’t wait, so that is going to have to come down. And the log flume, too, but there is no real time frame on that.”
Mita said he is getting cost estimates on demolishing the Ferris wheel. “It’s astronomical to take it down.”
He said previous repairs on the big wheel were welded into place, meaning it can’t be unbolted.
“You can’t even unscrew it to bring it down. It’s going to have to be cut down with torches because of the way the repairs were made. The way they did that it was never meant to come down. That’s the bottom line,” Mita said.
When Mita presented plans to the public for his vision of a hotel, it included keeping a few rides, including the Ferris wheel and carousel.
“That was originally one of the thoughts,” he said, “and this just killed that plan. It’s just way too dangerous, way too dangerous.”
Mita said he hasn’t informed council about the latest conditions, but said the city came out to inspect the property and last week gave him two weeks to provide a response.
“They said you’ve got to do something, you’ve got to demo,” he said. “I’m talking to engineers, I’m talking to steel experts, we’re going as quick as we can.”
– STORY and PHOTOS by DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
