Hotel has 252 rooms, carousel, Ferris wheel, would pay $1 mil in taxes
OCEAN CITY — Eustace Mita has proposed a 252-room hotel. that he believes will stand the test of time, to replace the Wonderland Pier amusement park, which closed in October after nearly 60 years in business at Sixth Street and Boardwalk.
Mita, who owns Icona Resorts and Achristavest Fine Home Builders, said the hotel would include 10 to 12 stores on the boardwalk side and would keep Wonderland’s iconic rides — the century-old carousel and towering Ferris wheel.
He argues the Icona at Wonderland would provide needed hotel rooms to the city’s diminished stock, provide a boost to the boardwalk and $1 million in tax payments annually.
“Not only would it stand out for Ocean City, it would stand out on a national basis,” he said of the hotel. “You could pretty much buy any hotel you wanted in Philadelphia for $100 million. We’re going to spend between $135 and $150 million to bring this to fruition.
“If we didn’t have the other eight hotels to support it, it wouldn’t work because it will take at least seven to 10 years to make a profit there.”
Mita said the Icona at Wonderland would be “iconic.”
“Not only will it rejuvenate the boardwalk and give it something new, we found that wherever we’ve built an Icona, that a rising tide takes all boats with it,” increasing property values, he said. As an example he noted The Grand Hotel in Cape May renovated its whole building after Icona built next door.
“We’re really excited about it. We think we answered the ‘let’s keep the memories’ with the carousel and preserve and enhance what we already have. America’s Greatest Family Resort has to have enough hotel rooms to support our boardwalk merchants and our Asbury Avenue merchants.”
Mita’s plan includes renovating the century-old carousel over a two-year period and placing it on the south side of the hotel and putting the Ferris wheel on a platform 10 feet higher on the north side. He would replace the lights to make it visible from the Garden State Parkway.
“I think we’re all, my own family included, (feeling) an element of sadness to see Wonderland go, but we felt we could enhance and preserve a lot of that by keeping the two amusements that are so iconic,” he said.
In 2023, Mita proposed building a large hotel on open city-owned land between Carey Stadium and the Boardwalk, between Wonderland and Fifth Street, but local officials quickly panned the idea.
The local developer met with small groups of Ocean City Council members then unveiled his plan to the Boardwalk Merchants Association last week.
Mita bought the Wonderland property in early 2021 after a bank foreclosed on $8 million in loans to owner Jay Gillian. Mita then leased the amusement park back to Gillian, who continued operating it before announcing in August it would close permanently because it was no longer financially viable.
The appearance before the Boardwalk Merchants Association was the first in a schedule of public events for Mita, who will be pitching the idea to the Downtown Merchants Association and will be at Councilman Jody Levchuk’s Third Ward meeting at 6 p.m. Monday, Nov. 25, at the Chris Maloney Lecture Hall at the Ocean City Free Public Library.
Mita said his projects, which include the Icona Avalon and Icona Windrift in Avalon, Icona Diamond Beach in Wildwood Crest, Icona Cape May and The Grand Victorian in Spring Lake, are based on “a forever concept.” Icona at Wonderland, however, would be the most expense “by far.”
He said a beach hotel is going up in northern New Jersey that is very modern in design and will look like a small version of the Revel casino in Atlantic City. That’s not what he proposes in Ocean City.
“To us, we wanted to build something that’s timeless. We call it ‘old seashore.’ It will look good today. It will look good 100 years from now,” he said.
“Our whole idea is the forever concept. We don’t want them to ever be out of style. We do that with our houses, too. We want them to last forever. We build them like they’re going to be there forever. We build them like the Rock of Gibraltar.”
Tax payment, parking,
diminishing hotel rooms
“This is our moniker, America’s Greatest Family Resort, yet we’ve lost 70 percent of our hotel room supply in the last three decades. What’s the broad definition of resort? Hotels and entertainment,” Mita said. “We have the entertainment, but we haven’t had a new hotel in over a half a century so America’s Greatest Family Resort is in dire need of a new hotel.”
To the residents and officials concerned about parking, Mita said the hotel will have 375 parking spots for 252 rooms. Wonderland had thousands of visitors at a time, yet had no parking.
The Wonderland site is now zoned for amusements. Mita wants City Council to declare it a site in need of redevelopment. That would mean the community would get the bulk of tax payments, which he said would be $1 million.
“If our council decides to deem it a redevelopment site, automatically instead of 35 cents on the taxable dollar … you’ll get 95 cents on the taxable dollar. Right now Wonderland pays about $100,000 plus in taxes. Some of it goes to the county, some of it goes to the state. In a redevelopment zone, the city of Ocean City would keep 95 cents on the dollar. And we anticipate a million dollars in tax.
“It would be the highest ratable in Ocean City to help with our roads, our bridges, our infrastructure, so it’s truly, we believe, a win-win all the way around: a win for the city from a tax basis, a win for the city that has to maintain the moniker America’s Greatest Family Resort, and a win for our own community, which wants to keep the memories from Wonderland. So we’re very excited about it.”
– By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
