Hefty investments around all corners of the 17th Street Causeway bridge are upgrading a cluster of properties that serve as stages for the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show. Vessel-friendly venues make the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show possible, and both landside and waterside upgrades to these properties have sustained the growth of the 64-year-old show. The most prominent of these property improvements are happening at the four corners of the boat show, on both ends of the 17th Street Causeway: the Broward County Convention Center and Hilton Fort Lauderdale Marina hotel on the western end, and on the eastern end, the Superyacht Village and Pier Sixty-Six Resort. Bahia Mar Yachting Center was the sole venue when the annual boat show began in 1959 and remains the hub of the show. But as the number and size of the boat exhibitions grew, so did the number of venues. “What Hilton and the other marinas give us is flex capacity for bigger boats,” said Phil Purcell, president and CEO of the Marine Industries Association of South Florida, the trade group that owns the show. Seven sites normally serve as boat show’s venues, but one will be offline this year. An ongoing expansion of the Las Olas Marina has cut the number of venues at this year’s show to six. “We can’t wait for it to come back online; we would have sold it out this year. The number of exhibitors continues to grow. This year, the show is sold out again already,” Purcell said. “You’ll have over 1,100 boats in the water.” Hilton Fort Lauderdale Marina New floating docks are replacing old wooden finger docks at the Hilton Fort Lauderdale Marina hotel, where a new waterfront ballroom and restaurant just opened. The 17th Street Yacht Basin at the hotel recently replaced the old dock with a new concrete fixed dock and dredged to a depth of 16.5 feet. Electrical upgrades added 480-volt power in two locations. New floating docks are being installed in the interior basin, docking vessels up to 70 feet. A major renovation of the 595-room Hilton Marina ensued after the 2018 sale of the hotel. Blackstone, a New York-based investment firm, sold the property to Toronto-based Brookfield. They poured more money into a multi-year, multi-million-dollar renovation of the hotel at 1881 Southeast 17th Street by renovating all 595 rooms, along with the marina, lobby and meeting spaces. The new floating docks will provide 33 slips for boats up to 70 feet long on the north side of the property. The Hilton also has a face dock on the east side of the property for vessels up to 300 feet in length. Work on the docks was nearing completion in September. “Then we added that amazing new ballroom and event space on the water,” said Melissa Lane, the hotel’s general manager. The glassy building along the Intracoastal Waterway is two stories, but it looks taller because the ballroom on the first floor has a 24-foot ceiling height. The new building replaced a one-story restaurant called China Grill, which the hotel had operated on the same site before Brookfield demolished it. Above the new ballroom, a Mediterranean restaurant, Olive & Sea, has opened for breakfast and dinner on the second floor of the new 21,000-square-foot building, right next to the face dock for megayachts. It features indoor and outdoor seating and panoramic views of the Intracoastal. Pier Sixty-Six Resort Originally developed in the 1950s as a fuel dock for Phillips 66 Petroleum, the 32-acre Pier Sixty-Six Resort is anchored by a world-class marina, with 164 deepwater slips for yachts and other vessels up to 400 feet long. Since acquiring Pier Sixty-Six in 2016, Orlando-based Tavistock Development Company has added docks and lighting to the marina and has dredged along the marina’s northwest corner to improve navigation. And even though a $1 billion redevelopment of Pier Sixty-Six is under way, adding condos and hotel rooms and resort amenities, the marina hasn’t missed a beat. “The marina has been fully operational during construction,” said Jessi Blakely, vice president of Tavistock. With prices starting at $3.85 million, 122 condos at the Pier Sixty-Six site are under construction. Meanwhile Tavistock’s long-running revitalization of Pier Sixty-Six got off to a slow start. But the finish line is in sight. Less than a year after Tavistock bought the hotel and marina in 2016 for about $163 million, the venerable property took a big hit from Hurricane Irma, which damaged part of the hotel’s roof and allowed water inside. The COVID-19 pandemic slowed progress, too. But now, Tavistock is about a year away from finishing most of the condo construction and a halo top-to-bottom renovation of the hotel tower, including its rotating top-floor lounge, the Pier Top. A second, shorter hotel that will be 10 stories tall is now under construction just north of the original 17-story hotel, bringing the total number of hotel rooms and suites at the new and improved Pier Sixty-Six to 325. “The full resort will re-open in fall 2024,” Blakely said. Superyacht Village The original footprint of Pier Sixty-Six was confined to the north side of Southeast 17th Street. But soon after its purchase of Pier Sixty-Six, Tavistock paid $24 million for a nearby marina property on the south side of 17th Street, which was called Sails Marina. Since 2019, this portion of the Pier Sixty-Six campus has been known officially as Superyacht Village and informally as “Pier South.” During FLIBS, Superyacht Village serves as an exclusive venue where builders of yachts ranging up to 200 feet in length can meet with prospective buyers. Besides parking for mega-vessels, Superyacht Village also has a small building for meetings and events. “There are 100-footers and 200-footers over at Bahia Mar, too. What happened was, some of the builders wanted just a little bit more of a private area and a little bit more space,” Purcel said. “Pier Sixty-Six worked with us, and we came up with this great Superyacht Village concept.” During the boat show, Superyacht Village serves as a private product showcase where boat builders and buyers can mingle. Compared to the rest of the show, “it’s just a little more subdued, not as many people,” Purcell said. “It is laser-focused on people looking for a certain size boat or a certain builder.” The building at the marina is also used for events other than the boat show, including charitable fundraisers and the Triton Expo. Several years ago, he noted, one of the local symphonies played there. Broward County Convention Center Not all the boats in the show are in the water. The Broward County Convention Center is the boat show’s only indoor venue, where all the boats are floor exhibits on trailers. Last year, FLIBS used 350,000 square feet of space during the five-day boat show and is expected to take the same amount of space this year. “They are outgrowing their space. They need more space soon,” said Dafne Anderson, the convention center’s director of sales. More space is on the way. In phase one of a major expansion and renovation of the county-owned convention center, its exposition space grew to 350,000 square feet. Phase two of the overhaul of the convention center property will include a new building with two ballrooms – one 65,000 square feet, the other 15,000 – and a six-acre outdoor event plaza with a tropical look along the Intracoastal Waterway. At the same time, a private developer is building an 801-room Omni hotel on county land at Southeast 17th Street and Eisenhower Boulevard, next to the convention center. “That is all under construction. That will be completed very late in 2025,” said Michael Pouey, vice president of group and convention sales at the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention & Visitors Bureau. “We’re really selling it for 2026 and beyond.” Triton’s new issue is now out! Click here to read it!