Gene Mulvihill to propose ‘world's biggest' water park

In Xanadu did Kublai Kahn, a stately pleasure dome decree. . . hardyston - Okay, it’s not the mythic Xanadu of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s imagination, but Vernon Township. Nor is it the legendary conqueror Kublai Kahn, but the locally legendary developer Eugene Mulvihill. As for stately, well, that will be in the eye of the beholder. But one thing’s for certain, it sure is a pleasure dome. Picture, if you will, a vast translucent canopy covering nearly five acres and spanning a gorge in the rocky landscape around the Legends Resort and sheltering both a tropical arboretum and the biggest indoor water park you, or anyone alive, has ever seen. Picture a splendid hotel of 1,000 rooms next to it. Picture Vernon as the recreation capital of the northeast. Mulvihill has not only pictured it, he’s paying people as you read this to draw pictures of it, pictures that he will soon bring before the Vernon Township Planning Board for approval of what he says will be a project worth not tens, but hundreds of millions of dollars. In the movie “The Graduate,” the secret to success was “plastics.” In Vernon, says Gene Mulvihill, it’s “critical mass.” And Mulvihill, whose footprint on Vernon and neighboring Hardyston would make Big Foot’s look like that of a bunny rabbit, is about to propose to town planners a mass of which some are sure to be critical. “What we want to do in Vernon - it’s a new thing - is an indoor water park,” the developer said recently, while seated in the lounge of the big, half-timbered clubhouse he built at Crystal Springs in Hardyston. “There are about 100 of them either up or going up all over the country, five or six of them in the Poconos. If we don’t have one here, the Poconos are going to eat our lunch.” It’s no ordinary water park Mulvihill has in mind. He has only preliminary drawings, but they show an enormous canopy covering 200,000 square feet and spanning a canyon on the 600 acres he owns surrounding the Legends Hotel off Route 517. That’s about 4.5 acres under one roof, a space that could hold four football fields. But it’s no ordinary roof, either. “I want to span the canyon with a type of dome that allows ultraviolet light to go through,” he said, warming to his subject. “We can have all kinds of rare plants. People will come from all over just to see the gardens and the plants we have in there. It will be the world’s largest indoor water park. “The guys who are designing it used to work for Disney World. They say they’ve never seen anything like it.” Mulvihill likes that thought, likes the idea that he will build something that no one’s ever built before, something that will help bring the critical mass he talks about to Vernon. The water park would join two new hotels and an indoor sports complex he has received permission to build on the site of the Sammis farm on Route 94, located south of his development at Minerals Spa and north of Mountain Creek’s south lodge. Vernon calls itself the four seasons resort community, and the centerpiece of the town’s future is the planned development at Mountain Creek being built by Intrawest, a Vancouver-based company which has recently been looking for either a buyer or a partner with deep pockets. The first stage of the development, the Appalachian, is being built in two phases at the foot of the north ski area. The first phase, originally scheduled for completion last summer, contains 100 units of resort housing and is expected to open about a year late. The second phase is going up much more quickly and will provide 77 more units. If Mountain Creek maintains its original schedule, work should then begin on a recreation, dining, shopping and entertainment village across the street from the Appalachian. But, Mulvihill says, Intrawest owns fewer than 40 acres. If Vernon truly wants to be a four seasons resort, he says, it needs additional attractions to bring people into the town. He envisions sports academies at the Sammis Road property, with soccer, lacrosse and other sports teams coming from all over the East Coast to practice, learn and play tournaments. At Crystal Springs, Mulvihill and his son, Andrew, have added two golf courses to the one that was on the site when he took it over in the early 1990s after the original owner went bankrupt. He also built Ballyowen, a critically acclaimed course, on Wheatsworth Road in Hardyston and is in the process of adding a fourth course at Crystal Springs. There were about 100 homes built at Crystal Springs when he took over, and he’s closing in on 900 now. The condominiums have helped keep Hardyston’s tax rate low, producing just one school-aged child for every ten units. Mulvihill also built some 1,300 condos in Vernon around the Minerals Spa and yet another golf course. Those units contribute fewer than 200 children to township schools, making it a net tax benefit to the town. If the water park becomes a reality, Mulvihill feels it would be the final magnet to bring people to an area that The New York Post recently wrote about as the “Myrtle Beach” of the Northeast, referring to the famous golfing destination. To house the people who come to use it, he wants to add a hotel - a very large hotel. Then, on land around the 27-hole Tom Fazio-designed Legends golf course, he wants to build 100 - 200 “million-dollar golf villas.” “It has to be spectacular architecture,” Mulvihill says of his proposal. He says the cost of the projects will be “hundreds of millions.” The benefit, he says, is “millions in property taxes.” It’s sure to draw opposition in Vernon, where some people blame him for the deterioration of the old Playboy Club hotel, which is now facing a tax foreclosure. But Mulvihill, who also once owned Mountain Creek - it was Great Gorge back then - sold the hotel three years before the next owner went belly-up and sold it again. He says he has no interest in Legends or what happens to it. As for his critics, among whom are people who say he’s chronically late in paying suppliers and other contracted services, he says, “no developer is ever popular.” Mulvihill is more than just the developments in Hardyston and Vernon. Born in West Orange, educated at Lehigh University, and a veteran of the Marine Corps, the 71-year-old is an investment broker who first made his money selling mutual funds. He’s a collector of vintage wines with a world-class collection two stories below the Crystal Springs clubhouse, and he’s been involved in technology. Recently, he bought the rights to a magnetic resonance machine that can tell if a bottle of wine has gone bad without having to open it. The machine has created something of a stir among wine collectors and earned him an article in Forbes magazine. He came to Vernon when he bought Vernon Valley ski resort - the south mountain at Mountain Creek and then took over Great Gorge - the north mountain, when the original owner, Jack Kurlander, went bankrupt. He later sold the area to Intrawest. While he owned the ski resort, he was investigated by the state and found guilty of insurance fraud, for which he paid a fine. A large number of other alleged violations relating to the resort he dismisses as petty and politically motivated. The fraud conviction, according to the Forbes article, was expunged from his record. But nothing has ever slowed him down, and the plans for Vernon show that he’s thinking bigger, not smaller. “I’ve never gone bankrupt,” he says. “What did I build that’s bad? Did I build a toxic-waste company?”