Icona’s Eustace Mita pitches concept on city-owned parcel near Carey Stadium, Civic Center
OCEAN CITY — During last spring’s mayoral campaign, challenger Keith Hartzell ran on a platform that focused largely on fighting the concept of new high-rise hotels on the boardwalk.
Hartzell, a longtime councilman, was referring to an idea floated by luxury hotel and real estate developer Eustace Mita, who rescued Mayor Jay Gillian’s Wonderland Pier by buying the amusement park property at Sixth Street and the Boardwalk after banks called in nearly $8 million in loans.
During the campaign, Gillian said he had no plans to build a hotel and that Mita had partnered with him to save the amusement park that has been in his family for three generations but had fallen on hard times aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
After Thursday night’s Ocean City Council meeting, Hartzell, who lost the race to Gillian, is feeling vindicated, but not because Gillian has proposed building anything.
Mita, his attorney and one of his architects dominated the 48-minute meeting with a lengthy conceptual presentation about building a luxury hotel they said would stand the test of time.
Rather than replace the amusement park, which some had feared had been Mita’s plan for acquiring the amusement park property, he has proposed buying the open city-owned land next door — bordered by Fifth and Sixth streets, the boardwalk and the parking lot for the Civic Center and Carey Field. That plot now has sand dunes and beach volleyball courts.
Mita called it a win-win for the city.
“The idea is for once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We haven’t had a new hotel in over half a century. We think we have a one-time opportunity in a whole century to put together a destination and a premiere hotel … that 50, 100 years from now will still look good and generation after generation can enjoy it,” Mita said at the conclusion of the presentation.
He said there is a single great piece of property on the boardwalk that currently generates no income for the resort, noting that if it were transferred into private hands the tax revenues would go into the city budget to help pay for things such as roads and infrastructure.
“We would immediately be the highest taxpayer by a wide margin in Ocean City and that’s a gift that would go on for decades and decades,” he said of the plan. The conceptual designs show an eight-story structure – a seven-story hotel in the center, smaller wings to the north and south and 400-space parking below – with 325 rooms and a cost in excess of $160 million, not including land acquisition.
“It’s a win-win for the citizenry of Ocean City … because the taxes paid, the revenues generated makes the taxes less on residents,” he said.
The second major point is that that end of the boardwalk “needs an anchor to give it the class we know it deserves” and it would have “upscale retail, like Vineyard Vines … that will come into a property like this because it will be open year-round.”
He noted that although in the offseason the occupancy is lower, it would remain open like the other hotel properties owned by his company, Icona Resorts, to keep the management team in place. However, that still boosts the resort’s shoulder season.
“All hotels of our size average four occupants per room per week. To make the math easy, if you had 200 rooms, that’s 800 visitors a week” to enjoy the boardwalk, start at Sixth Street and go up to 14th Street (the end of the retail end of the boardwalk), then walk over to Asbury Avenue, he said.
“This is just the starting line,” he said. “We’d like to bring it over the finish line.”
Contacted after the meeting, Hartzell said he believes his campaigning against hotels was downplayed by media outlets, including this one, and that he has been vindicated because people don’t want that big a change on the boardwalk.
Related to that, he argued during his campaign that allowing a hotel of more than 100 rooms would be a backdoor way of bringing alcohol sales into the resort. Mita said he has no plans to serve alcohol in the resort. (See related story.)
Ocean City, a dry town, bans the sale of alcohol inside city limits but there is a provision in state law that it could be allowed if approved by the local government. A referendum to allow BYOB was defeated by a 2-1 margin in the resort, but a number of restaurants have worked their way around the ban by creating supper clubs that allow paying members to bring alcohol into their establishments when they dine.
During Mita’s presentation he offered a look at a number of his other resorts in Cape May County. One in Avalon showed a video of people enjoying a brewpub.
“I want to get this upfront. There is not going to be a brewpub in what we want to be Icona Ocean City,” Mita said.
During his campaign, Hartzell said a large hotel would not be economically feasible without alcohol sales.
Hartzell said he doesn’t believe the city should sell the open parcel to any private developer because it should remain open for the public good. He said comments he received during his campaign – and again since Mita unveiled his proposal Thursday evening – remain overwhelmingly against having high-rise hotels on the boardwalk.
He said he wouldn’t mind if Mita wanted to build a more modest hotel of no more than three stories on part of the property now occupied by Wonderland Pier, shrinking the amusement park in size but keeping it going.
However, he noted because having a hotel with a hundred rooms would still provide a pathway to getting a liquor license, that if Mita wanted to build something with, say, 200 rooms, he should have to have two separate buildings to keep both under the size that could conceivably acquire a liquor license.
The former councilman, who served from 2006 until the end of 2020, said he would continue to fight against high-rise hotels on the Ocean City boardwalk.
At the council meeting, neither the mayor nor members of council commented negatively or positively on Mita’s proposal. For his part, Mita did not ask for a vote on his proposal at this stage.
Attorney speaks first
Attorney Stephen Nehmad represented Mita, his client, with Icona Resorts LLC and Achristavest, a luxury residential developer.
He spoke of the “sustainable significant luxury design” of his client’s hotel and residential properties. Nehmad said every aspect of Mita’s properties pays attention to detail and that they are built with the idea they will be designs not for a certain period, but for generations.
“He seeks to build what I consider one of most significant landmark facilities,” Nehmad said, an iconic structure “which I think will grace the skyline of your community … for generations to come.”
Nehmad said he didn’t know if the conceptual design would be acceptable but Mita has given it great attention because he recognizes the lifeblood of the Ocean City economy is hospitality. Of great importance to that is hotel rooms, of which there has been a “tremendous erosion” through the years because of lots devoted to the residential market and turning them into condominiums.
“This is just a beginning,” the attorney said, of an initiative that would require joint cooperation among himself, Mita, city officials and the community. “This is just our effort to reach out to you … to show what he would like to do.”
Eustace Mita offers his Ocean City bona fides, what he has done with his other properties
Mita went through a list of his properties with a presentation showing his Icona resorts Avalon, Cape May and Diamond Beach, Lower Township. (See icona.com and achristavest.com for more information.)
He said when he took over an aging resort in Avalon it was an eyesore and they took it “down to the studs” to renovate it. He said his children assert he has OCD because he is so concerned about every detail.
Mita said all the design is with the “forever concept.”
“We don’t want our homes to be knocked down, so everything we do architecturally is to give it a look we call ‘old seashore,’ where it looked good 50 years ago and it’s gonna look good 50 years from now,” he said, adding the only place where there is an open lot in Ocean City is where a building has been knocked down.
He said they took the old hotel in Diamond Beach, which was rated by Trip Advisor as 74 out of 78 hotels in the area – almost dead last.
After he rebranded it and rebuilt it as Icona, it went from 74 out of 78 to No. 1 in the area, he said. In Avalon, the Golden Inn was rated No. 7, which was dead last because there were only seven on the island.
“Every molecule of that place has been rebuilt. It is rated No. 1 now,” he said.
The property in Cape May was rated 36 out of 38 hotels. Mita said it looked like an old school building called the Palace.
“We took what was a junk box and turned it into a jewel box. It’s little but everything in it is first class.”
He said there are 100,000 hotels and motels in the United States.
“Icona Diamond Beach went from 74 out of 78 on Five Mile Beach to being No. 1 in New Jersey, two years later was in the top 25 in America. Today, Icona Cape May, Icona Diamond Beach and Icona Avalon are rated in the top 75 out of 100,000 hotels,” he said. “The St. Regis can’t say that. The Ritz Carlton can’t say that and the Four Seasons can’t say that.
“I don’t tell you that to impress you, but what impresses me is what can happen — and here we are in little Cape May County — and we have the No. 1, 2, 3 rated hotels, in the top 75 in the United States of America,” he said.
“And here I am in my own hometown. My grandfather Frank Mita came here over 90 years ago. My uncle Paul Mita was a lifeguard with Bob Harbaugh and the rest of the team there at Bob’s Grill. He’s been here over 70 years,” Mita said, adding he started dating his wife here during his senior year in high school.
“We have a great history and raised five children here. Now we have 17 grandchildren. Ocean City has a special, special place in my heart,” he said.
A decline in hotel rooms in Ocean City
Like Nehmad, Mita said in America’s Greatest Family Resort, the number one revenue generator is tourism and the main thing that supports that is hotel rooms.
He said since the year 2000, Ocean City went from 3,000 hotel rooms to a little more than 750.
“We’re eating our own livelihood,” he said. “The boardwalk is not the boardwalk it was 15 or 20 years ago. Why?”
He said former hotels such as the Seaspray and Crossings off 34th Street turned condo. And because of the nature of having so many owners, it is impossible to get them all to agree to be rebuild, something he ted with the Seaspray, and got some 26 of the 28 owners to agree. Because two did not, the old place still stands not renovated at an entrance to the city.
He said he doesn’t want to build a condo hotel because that wouldn’t stand the test of time.
“Those two buildings can’t be knocked down in our lifetime or our children’s lifetime. That’s what I mean by we’re eating our own livelihood,” he said.
Since a new hotel hasn’t been built in more than a half-century, he said he went to his team to build a grand hotel that would be an attraction in and of itself.
“What kind of nutball would invest this kind of money in a dry town and build a hotel? Only someone who has a heart for Ocean City the way that I do … and we have eight other hotels that would support it because it would take over 10 years to make it profitable when you see the scope of the project we would like to do,” Mita said.
“We don’t want it to be the nicest in Ocean City. We want it to be the nicest on the East Coast.”
Architect shows design concept
Alvar Cortado, with Das Architects, said he was proud to show their concept for the Ocean City property, which came about after they toured impressive hotels in different parts of the country.
Putting it where the parking lot for the football field and Civic Center ends, “This is probably the best location in Ocean City. And probably best location at the Jersey shore,” he said, pointing out it has the residential neighborhood to the north and the commercial to the south.
He said they toured Ocean City as well and looked at the community and the history and architecture. He said famed architect Vivian Smith designed City Hall, the Music Pier and The Flanders Hotel, City Hall in Ventnor and two beautiful hotels in Atlantic City that have since been demolished.
The architect said recognizing that Ocean City is a family town, they “took all pieces and put them together and came up with what we think is a beautiful design that is a mix of New England style with touches of Spanish Colonial and French.”
The ground level is for commercial and retail, with a courtyard in the center front featuring a gazebo where there can be bands and concerts to attract people. An infinity pool would be on the level above that with the hotel set back (see concepts) and a high-rising center building with smaller buildings to the north and south. The project would not decrease the size of the municipal parking lot or eliminate spaces but instead add a tree-lined boulevard in between it and the hotel.
Two members of the public who spoke at the end of the meeting cautioned council to consider the impact of putting a luxury hotel on the boardwalk, and whether it would fit with the longtime family nature of the resort and lead to a high-end trend in which families would be priced out.
– By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff