With four proposals on the table for Vero’s Three Corners riverfront redevelopment project, stakeholders are going to be divided about which plan is best.
But one thing is sure – if you created the ideal Three Corners developer from scratch, it would be difficult to come up with one more well suited to tackle the project and successfully see it through than barrier island resident Donald Urgo.
From a deep-seated love of Vero Beach that began before he started elementary school, to a 50-plus-year career developing and operating major hotel and mixed-use projects around the world to the stellar development team and rock-solid financial backing he has assembled, Urgo pretty much has it all.
His $172-million Vista Blue Vero Beach Resort and Spa would repurpose the great hall of Vero’s shuttered power plant as a three-level, multipurpose entertainment, exhibition and hospitality venue designed by a powerplant reuse specialty firm and featuring extensive rooftop sports activities.
It would include a 225-room, 4-star resort hotel loaded with amenities attached to the great hall, three free-standing restaurants, numerous shops and a robust marina with slips for permanent moorings, day-use visitors and mega-yachts up to 150 feet, which Urgo said will bring visual excitement and a sense of scale to the project.
There will also be lots of open space.
“We were very careful about how we designed the waterfront,” Urgo said. “It would be easy to over-develop. We could have packed the waterfront with five or six restaurants and lots of other buildings but that would not have fit the site or the laid-back feel of Vero Beach. We see that section more as a waterfront park and promenade than as a retail row.
“This is not Naples or Delray Beach, and the scale of what we build should reflect that.”
Urgo has been intently focused on the project since it was first proposed more than four years ago, making repeated visits to the site with engineers, architects and Urgo Hotel and Resorts staffers before the city put out its earliest feelers for developer interest.
On Monday, he told Vero Beach 32963 exclusively that since submitting his proposal to the city he and his team have locked in a commitment for the hotel to operate under the Marriott flag – a brand he has a long history with, dating back to 1970, when he was a young attorney tapped by Bill Marriott to lead the hotel company’s expansion into Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
“There is a good chance it will be a Marriott Autograph hotel, [a collection of premium hotels] that lets you have your own independent brand while still being fully associated with Marriott,” Urgo said. “But that has not yet been decided for sure.”
Urgo and his partners certainly see their Three Corners plan as a way to make a big, positive contribution to Vero Beach but also as an attractive money-making opportunity. They plan to put up 50 percent of the development capital themselves and own and operate the hotel and restaurants long-term.
“We’ve done extensive financial projections and market research, and we think the restaurants can do very well,” said Urgo, who first became aware of Vero Beach in the early 1940s as a distant, mythical place where his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers swung their bats during spring training.
Urgo grew up in a mixed family in Flatbush, during and after World War II – one uncle was a rabid Giants fan while another was a die-hard Yankees fan, but he joined forces with his dad and brother who adored the Dodgers.
“I’ve been a Dodgers fan since I was 3 years old,” Urgo said, “and I’m still a Dodgers fan today!”
His family never had a chance to visit Dodgertown when he was a kid but after he graduated from law school, he worked with a partner at a Wall Street law firm who had a home in Old Riomar.
“He was near retirement, and I came down to his house on a number of occasions to deal with legal matters, and I made sure that I came during spring training, so I could see the Dodgers play.”
It was at the same Wall Street firm that Urgo was first assigned legal work for a hotel client in the mid-1960s.
“Nobody at the firm had experience handling legal matters for hotels, and I didn’t either, but they told me to learn,” Urgo said.
His success with that first hotel client led to work for Marriott when the company purchased the landmark Essex House overlooking Central Park in Manhattan, converting the upper floors of the 44-story, Art Deco building to condos and operating the rest as a hotel that continues today as JW Marriott Essex House New York.
Before long, in 1970, he was given the assignment by Bill Marriott to go abroad, locate likely markets, find local investment partners, and get hotels built and opened from Paris to Cairo to Athens to the Far East.
“I did that for 10 or 12 years,” Urgo said, “but my wife and I wanted to have a large family and the job required too much travel, so I went out on my own.”
Urgo developed his first hotel on his own dime almost by accident.
“My wife’s family had moved from Flatbush to Uniondale on Long island,” Urgo said. “There were no hotels in town, and I thought there should be, so I developed one with some partners that became a Marriott hotel.
That hotel, which is adjacent to the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale, was completed in 1980 and operates today as the Long Island Marriott.
With that success under his belt, Urgo continued to look for and capitalize on other hotel development opportunities in the United States, and Canada while still doing legal work for clients.
“We got more serious about development as time went by,” Urgo said. “Around 2000, it stopped being my avocation and became my vocation. I stopped taking on client work and concentrated on hotel deals. We thought we might do one a year, but it turned out to be considerably more than that,” including luxurious mountain lodges, ski resort hotels and seaside resorts.
Urgo Hotels and Resorts was operating 50 hotels when it merged with HHM, a larger hotel management and investment company in 2022.
“Our company continues to operate autonomously as Urgo Hotels and Resorts after the merger, with my son, Donald Urgo Jr., in charge. Most of our properties are ones we developed ourselves, but we also operate hotels for financial partners and investment groups.”
Urgo Hotels currently has properties in nine states and three Canadian provinces with more than 7,000 rooms, including at the Mont Tremblant ski resort in the Laurentian Mountains in Quebec, which Urgo points to as a major hotel and mixed-use development with many of the elements of the Three Corners project.
“Intrawest bought the property, which was very large but didn’t have many facilities, and we formed a partnership with them to develop it. There is probably 100,000 square feet of retail and 2,000 keys now, with hotel rooms, condos and apartments. We have two hotels there with retail, a Marriott and a Hilton.”
Two Urgo-related Florida projects relevant to Three Corners are Love Street in Jupiter and the Palm Beach Marriott Singer Island Resort & Spa, which Urgo bought out of bankruptcy with the Manocherian family, legendary New York real estate investors who have backed many of his projects and are partners in Vista Blue Vero Beach Resort and Spa.
“The previous owners lost a lot of money there in the three or four years after they built it,” Urgo said. “We turned it around quickly and made close to $2 million the first year.”
Love Street, across the Loxahatchee River from the Jupiter Lighthouse, is a wildly popular waterfront destination with docks, an outdoor activity center and three restaurants. It was developed by Collins Development and New York’s famed Lessing’s Hospitality Group, both partners in Vista Blue.
“Lessing’s is a fantastic company that has been around since the 1890s and has about 120 facilities [ranging from the finest of fine dining venues to university cafeterias], which all do very well,” Urgo said. “They are very good at what they do.”
Jeffrey Collins, head of Collins development, has an impressive portfolio of waterfront commercial and luxury residential projects completed and underway in and around Jupiter.
“I went down and met with Michael Lessing after Love Street opened and he introduced me to Jeffrey Collins,” Urgo said. “I brought them up to Vero and they both got very excited about the possibilities of the Three Corners project.”
Another key partner in Vista Blue is John’s Island resident Steve Bell, founder of Bell Partners, a multi-billion-dollar real estate investment firm, who is an enthusiastic backer of Urgo’s plan.
“He is investing as an individual, not through his company,” Urgo said, noting that he and his partners are confident of getting a bank loan for the balance of the project costs because of their substantial personal investment and the track records and reputations of those involved.
If the group gets the contract to develop the city property, the partners hope to complete the project by 2028 and expect their hotel and restaurants to generate about $42 million in revenue the first year, not counting income from the marina and retail outlets.
By year five, they expect revenue to increase substantially to about $64 million, with a $21 million profit before taxes and depreciation.
Donald Urgo and his wife Carolyn have homes in John’s Island and Marbrisa. They achieved their goal of a large family, with 10 children and 30 grandchildren, so far, including three sons who followed their father into the hotel business.
One of them, Collin Urgo, who has had a long, successful career in hotel development and management, lives down the street from his parents in Marbrisa. He will be working full-time alongside his father on Vista Blue if they get the deal.
“My son Don Jr. signed a contract to stay on after we merged,” Donald Urgo said, referencing the deal that freed him up to concentrate on Three Corners. “But Collin only signed a short-term contract and is free now to focus on this project, which he loves as much as I do.”
The four Three Corners proposals are being reviewed now by a special city committee, which will rank the proposals initially on April 26, interview the developers and make a final recommendation to the city council in May. The City Council is scheduled to pick a developer at a 9:30 am meeting on May 28.
