Marina Mall and Yacht Club

At the shopping center's facade, the passage to the water meets rows of yacht pontoons. The berths here were conceived as a complete waterfront service: repairs, fuel, restaurants, and places for boat owners to meet were gathered beside their moorings. Residents of the nearby towers and ordinary visitors use the shopping galleries, while a water taxi once ran from here. The waterfront promenade is open to everyone, but a pontoon space for a yacht is arranged separately.

In early October two thousand eight, Brian Simpson, the fifty-year-old owner of a thirty-two-foot yacht, was seeking the right to keep it in Dubai Marina without buying club membership. For two years, he had paid almost thirty thousand dirhams a year for a berth. Then Emaar executives sent him a new contract: join the yacht club, then under construction, by October first or give up the space. For Simpson, the entry fee exceeded one hundred thousand dirhams.

He showed the contract to a journalist and listed what he was being asked to pay for: the showers and toilets were not yet operating, there was no separate parking for boat owners, and water outages occurred. Spending the night on his own yacht cost him another five hundred dirhams for car parking. The Canadian Clayton Mikitiuk had only just moved his boat here and received the same condition: eighty thousand dirhams or leave.

The club's general manager, Steve Steglebauer, responded on its behalf. He had made his living managing marinas in Florida for thirty years and came to Dubai to bring together restaurants, competitions, repairs, fuel, and a community of owners around the berths. Many local customers, he said, had acquired a boat for the first time, and yacht life needed more than just pontoons. Steglebauer explained the mandatory membership as a desire to bring all the services together, but when asked directly why owners had not been left a choice, the club did not answer.

Simpson's personal choice cannot be traced in later publications. The outcome for the berths is known: by late October, the club had opened with three hundred members, each of whom had contributed at least forty-eight thousand dirhams. Six years later, there were almost no vacant spaces here. Sales director Pouyan Farnam was looking for an eleven-meter berth for a new boat, but received only a fourteen-meter one and paid sixty-five thousand dirhams a year for it. Other owners he knew moved their boats to neighboring emirates.

Steglebauer's team left part of the building open to everyone: two restaurants, event spaces, and a water taxi to the shopping center. In December of the same year, Dubai Marina Mall began operating nearby with one hundred sixty stores. The mall's managers were counting first and foremost on several thousand residents of the new district. This created two different ways to access the water side by side: any visitor could pass through the shopping galleries, while a place at a pontoon went to an owner with a contract and membership fee.

In January two thousand seventeen, Emaar executives closed the club's low building, moved berth services to the Address Dubai Marina hotel, and demolished the structure. A two-hundred-thirty-meter tower with the Vida Dubai Marina & Yacht Club hotel and apartments now stands on its site. The club itself, because of which Simpson could have lost his berth, no longer exists; its name remains on the new tower and on the service that assigns spaces for boats.