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Wall Street Journal
Click to ViewcloseWall Street JournalRockaways Inn Rides Renewal Wave
The Playland Motel as a Sign of Recovery
By PERVAIZ SHALLWANI
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Nearly a month after a boutique hotel called Playland Motel opened a few blocks from his Rockaway Beach home, Michael Mahoney went to check out the much-hyped spot.
Mr. Mahoney, 63 years old, whose parents once owned a nearby Irish pub that is now a Laundromat, grew up in the neighborhood, left in the 1990s and returned seven years ago to retire. And as a longtime resident, he had been skeptical about the new hotel—but left with guarded optimism that the area could again be the summer destination it once was.
“To look at how colorful, happy and exciting it looks—it’s beautiful,” said Mr. Mahoney after taking a brief tour of the two-story building that a young clientele has been packing on the weekends. “What I see is a renewal of the Rockaways.”
Once a vacation spot for movie stars and later home to the now-shuttered Playland amusement park, Rockaway Beach has been through a nearly four-decade roller-coaster ride—most recently seeing homes gutted and businesses closed by superstorm Sandy. Still, residents and community leaders see businesses such as the new motel as signs of a recovery taking foot.
“In the last three years, we started to see new residents and new blood taking interest in the neighborhood,” said Dolores Orr, the chairwoman of the local community board.
To date, all but eight of the 40 storefronts along the main stretch of Rockaway Beach Boulevard—the neighborhood’s commercial strip—have reopened 10 months after the storm, Ms. Orr said. A shopping center off the stretch still remains in shambles.
Along with the new motel, a cluster of new businesses including two wine bars, an Uzbeki restaurant and a gourmet deli have set up shop. Just off the boulevard, the Rockaway Beach Surf Club has reopened for business, securing a liquor license that its owners hope will draw customers and funding for a separate nonprofit that works with the community on public art and recreation projects.
“All of those businesses were planned pre-Sandy and our concern was, would they go forward with them?” Ms. Orr said.
Adding to the swell are a growing number of private bus companies that offer direct access to the beach, bringing in Manhattanites and Brooklyn residents faster than a subway ride.
“It’s about time they started to bring the tourists back,” said Mike Sullivan, 54, of Belle Harbor. “I have no problem with the hipsters, or whatever they are called. Wherever they go, they spend money.”
The most ambitious addition to the scene so far appears to have been the motel, taking over a spot that long served as a local watering hole.
“It really is a game changer,” said Gary Washington, 56, who retired from the Bronx to a condo two blocks from the motel. “There was an anticipation for the place, what are they and what’s going to happen.”
During its heyday, the storefront was Boggiano’s, a popular clam bar and pub with live music and rental apartments. In the 1990s, it gave way to the Tap & Grill, a local favorite and a pit stop for visitors heading to the subway a block away.
“It was rough, but it was home,” recalled Daniel Mulhill, 52, of Rockaway Beach on a recent Friday afternoon while having a few beers with friends in the new space. “Now it’s a nice environment,” he said of the Playland Motel
The night life at Playland draws newcomers to the Rockaways.
The plans for the motel began last May when building owner Andy Cholakis was looking to sell. A friend had mentioned the space to Jamie Wiseman, a commercial-real-estate broker who had worked on projects including the Output nightclub in Williamsburg and the conversion of a Bushwick church into 99 apartments.
Mr. Wiseman had been coming to the Rockaways for four years, because the beach was much closer than the Hamptons and because other young people from the city had begun to flock there. “Instead of hours waiting in line trying to drive to Montauk, it made sense to build something that was more accessible,” he said. “People drive out there and head back at night.”
Mr. Wiseman teamed up with colleague Robin Scott and friends Diego Galarza and Eduardo Suarez, owners of the Williamsburg restaurants El Almacen and Rosarito Fish Shack.
Within five days of meeting Mr. Cholakis, the sides were in contract to buy the space, according to Mr. Wiseman. By September, they had closed on the building, $1.3 million for 7,000 square feet of property a block from the beach with another 7,000 square feet outside, he said.
Two months later, the storm swept through, tearing off the building’s roof and pouring in 4 feet of water, mud and sand. “There was never a question about whether we were going to keep moving,” Mr. Wiseman said. “You kind of just have to go do it.”
What they have created is a cross between a bed-and-breakfast and a hostel, with shared bathrooms and showers, and an area for guests to mingle downstairs.
On a recent Saturday, Gavin Russom from the now-disbanded alternative dance band LCD Soundsystem was the night’s DJ. The next day, Tiki Disco, the popular roving dance party put on by the owners of Bushwick’s Roberta’s restaurant, was a nightcap for those headed to the train. For more than an hour after the beach officially closed at 6 p.m., the line for the disco party wrapped around the block. Inside, circles of friends lounged over cheap beer and pitchers of white sangria.
“It’s such a great, relaxing, chill place,” said Natalie Rawling, 31, of the East Village, celebrating a friend’s bachelorette party. “This is a place you would have out in the city, but it’s here.”
But the owners know that for the space to succeed, it needs to appeal to locals who stick around after summer ends. To that end, the restaurant, bar and an adjoining pizzeria were designed with the community’s tastes in mind, the owners say. The menu includes freshly caught seafood by fisherman James “Frankie the Fish,” Culleton, 57, of Rockaway Beach. On a recent weekend he had provided the restaurant with local clams, fluke and tender scallops.
More than two-thirds of the staff are local, including some holdovers from the Tap & Grill, according to Mr. Wiseman. There are movie nights in the works, and there have already been calls for birthday parties and weddings.
“I know it will get much slower,” Mr. Wiseman said, adding, “We are committed to the project. We certainly are not going to walk away from it.”
Write to Pervaiz Shallwani at
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Design Milk
Click to ViewcloseDesign MilkTHE ROCKAWAYS ARTISTIC PLAYGROUND: PLAYLAND MOTEL
Posted by Caroline Williamson
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This month’s Destination Design stays within the states and lands in New York’s own Rockaway Beach at a recently opened, campy destination called Playland Motel. Full of Beats, Eats, and Sleeps, this motel took an early 19th Century building and restored it with the help of twelve prominent designers and artists who designed individual rooms with their own aesthetic. The results are a designer motel catering to a younger crowd looking for a super fun getaway at the hotel, motel, Holiday Inn. (I dare you not to sing it.)
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NY Times
Click to ViewcloseNY TimesMontauk Comes to Queens
By ALAN FEUER
Published: August 2, 2013
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Imagine a beach club plucked from the East End of Long Island and dropped one block from the subway on Rockaway Beach Boulevard and you’ll start to get a picture of the Playland Motel, which began taking guests on the first weekend in July and, almost from the moment that it opened, became a destination both for residents of the Rockaways, Queens, and for what are known locally as D.F.D.’s, or Down for the Days.
“I feel like I’m in Montauk four years ago,” said Claudia Talamas, a 31-year-old wardrobe stylist who was visiting with friends last week from the East Village in Manhattan. “It’s so low-key. It’s just totally relaxing.”
Playland’s formula is a less strenuous, Queens-based version of places like the Surf Lodge, which have transformed Montauk into a party spot: a distressed wood patio, a pebbled “beach” with folding chairs, a couple of plastic splash pools and inexpensive beers. It also offers what the Rockaways had been lacking: a place to spend the night.
The ambience — bare feet are encouraged, Wall Street types are not — was a purposeful design choice by Playland’s four principal owners: Robin Scott and Jamie Wiseman, who are partners in the Brooklyn nightclub Output, and Diego Galarza and Eduardo Suarez, proprietors of the restaurants El Almacen and Rosarito Fish Shack in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
All four men had been visiting the Rockaways for years and decided in the spring of 2012 to try their hands at opening a restaurant-hotel. They heard about a local institution, the Tap and Grill clam bar, whose owner, Andy Cholakis, was looking to sell.
Within days of calling, they were in contract. They bought the place that summer, two months before Hurricane Sandy blew through, ruining the coastline and leaving their building waterlogged and mired in toxic goo. “It was really bad luck but it made us want to rebuild it more than ever and to honor what had been there,” Mr. Galarza recalled recently. “We wanted to keep the soul of the clam bar, to do something beachy and casual, but to bring in a sophisticated feeling from New York.”
To that end, Mr. Galarza and his partners hired Whitney Aycock, a chef from Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, who had moved to the Rockaways eight years earlier, to oversee their kitchen. Mr. Aycock, 39, formerly of the South Gate restaurant at the Essex House Hotel, in turn hired the best-known angler in the Rockaways — James F. Culleton, known locally as Frank the Fish — to provide him with the seafood for his menu. That Mr. Aycock also owned a boat, was known to go fishing and had grown up on the island of Jamaica (where his father owned restaurants for nearly 50 years) was in perfect keeping with the beachy atmosphere that Mr. Galarza wanted.
“Pretty much everything I own has sand in it,” Mr. Aycock said. “I’ve basically been in flip-flops for my entire life.”
As for the Playland’s guest rooms — there are 12 in all and they rent nightly for up to $250 — the partners hired artists from their circle of acquaintances and gave them total freedom in creating their designs. What resulted is hallway gallery in which unique aesthetic visions suddenly emerge from behind closed doors. In one room, a giant tepee sits atop a simple wooden bed frame. In another — called “My Bloody Dreams” — a four-person hammock dangles from the ceiling and red paint drips — à la the elevator scene in “The Shining” — down the walls.
Laura Bond, 28 and a fashion industry worker, spent one night last weekend with two of her friends from Williamsburg. “We were here the week before,” she said, “and it was totally insane. We wanted to come back and stay the night.”
The owners wondered at first whether the firefighters and police officers who populate the Rockaways would take to such insanity — not just to the funky decorations in the guest rooms, but to the bacchanalian parties that can last outside on the patio until 2 or 3 a.m. Last Saturday, for instance, a Brooklyn D.J. crew, No Ordinary Monkey, set up in a sound booth to spin Latin house tunes. Hundreds of revelers were swaying with their cocktails on the dance floor. A crimson beach ball was flying through the air, bouncing willy-nilly off people’s sweaty heads.
Adding to all of this, the Playland hopes in the next few weeks to start screening movies on a whitewashed wall outside and to open up a wood-stove pizzeria. In a testament to its increasing popularity, Rockabus, the Rockaways version of the Hampton Jitney, arranged last week to have a 1 a.m. shuttle pick up late-night stragglers at Playland’s door and return them to points in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
“When we got the keys from Andy,” Mr. Scott recalled, “he said, ‘I’m passing this on to you so you have to take good care it.’ It was important for us from the start not just to airlift Brooklyn culture to the Rockaways, but to respect the fact that we had arrived in someone else’s neighborhood.”
Before the motel opened, he and his partners shrewdly hired a pair of local barmen, Kenny Nichtern and John O’Connor, and installed them at the inside bar on Friday nights to cater to the hometown crowd that comes before the weekend customers arrive. On one such evening, with the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones as a soundtrack, six or seven firefighters were drinking cans of beer and considering the changes in the neighborhood. Some of them had grown up only blocks away and still had memories not only of the Tap and Grill, but of the bar that preceded it, Boggiano’s, and the now-defunct amusement park — also called Playland — that was once across the street.
One of them was a man who, in the clannish manner of the Rockaways, asked to be referred to by his nickname, Leaper.
“What do I think?” Leaper said. “I think that I’m in Florida. I think it’s kind of weird that they took the name Playland, but it’s got nothing to do with what actually used to be here.
“I’m not saying it’s a bad place, but it definitely isn’t what it was,” he added. “I suppose it’s what it is.”
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The Last Magazine
Click to ViewcloseThe Last MagazinePlayland Motel
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By: Emma Greenberg
Robin Scott and Jamie Wiseman are not new to the New York scene. They are, however, new to the beach. Scott, originally from London, and Wiseman, an Oklahoma transplant, are the savvy business minds behind the development of the Brooklyn club Output, and they are bringing their knowhow to the shore with their new project, the Playland Motel, which opened earlier this month on Rockaway Beach.
“We believe that New Yorkers need the opportunity to get to the beach and be able to be able to enjoy fresh, quality food and great drinks conveniently an hour away, without having to go through the commitment and stress of the whole Montauk and Hamptons scene,” says Scott. Just a stone’s throw away from the depths of the concrete jungle, the Playland Motel features twelve artist-designed rooms along with two restaurants, deck bar, boutique retail store, house DJ, and a clothing line called Weeeah.
Though the concept of a beachy, boozy, beat-fueled hangout may sound reminiscent of existing hotels, including Montauk’s always-packed Surf Lodge, Scott stresses that the motel is instead inspired by what Playland was from the early-nineteenth century through the Sixties: the duo wanted to bring back the “vibrant energy” of the original saloons, bungalows, and amusement park that lined the sand.
“We revitalized what was kind of an old man’s bar with its slum housing upstairs,” says Scott. “The way we went about the rooms—with different artists coming in with their own creative energy—made it an outlet for their creative juice.” Both local and international artists (including Pat Conlon, Ben Pundole, John Rawlins, and Athena Calderone) were tasked with designing each room with their own theme. According to the motel’s website, the rooms range from a “hot-and-heavy girlhood frolic with glitter sunburns, ponies, and wet swimsuits” to “iconic, pop detailing with a contemporary beach feel.” Scott and Wiseman expect the clientele to be just as varied: “We don’t like to go to the Hamptons and just hang out with rich people,” explains Scott, adding that he expects “locals, a sprinkling of hipsters, Europeans, South Americans,” and others to frequent the motel.
At the diner-like restaurant, Brooklynites will recognize cuisine from Williamsburg’s El Almacen and Rosarito Fish Shack thanks to Argentinean restaurateurs and cofounders Diego Galarza and Eduardo Suarez. The motel will also feature a pizzeria, as well as authentic Italian ice cream.
With Scott and Wiseman’s club background, it’s no wonder that music will also play a big role at their new space. “Music is an important part of life,” explains Scott. Liv Spencer, Playland’s appointed music director, will bring live music to the motel, as well as “curate a beachy sound,” according to Scott. Breezy surf rock and chilled-out EDM alike will ooze from a serious sound system designed by acclaimed club sound designer Jim Toth (who has designed systems for Santos Party House, Mudd Club, and Danceteria). The motel’s music will also have a “strong presence” on Soundcloud, so even if you can’t get to the Rockaways this summer, you can groove to the summer sounds. But if you do live in the New York area, it’s worth remembering the words of Queens locals the Ramones, who once reminded us, “It’s not hard, not far to reach. We can hitch a ride to Rockaway Beach.” This summer, the trip is more enticing than ever.
Playland Motel is now open at 97-20 Rockaway Beach Blvd, Rockaway Beach.
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Zagat
Click to ViewcloseZagatRockaway’s New Playland Motel: A Poor Man’s Hamptons?
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By Jenny Miller
Rocktauk? Monkaway? We’re brainstorming new names for Far Rockaway, since the scruffy little beach enclave – despite devastating hurricane damage to its famous boardwalk – is fast becoming less down-at-the-heel. The latest upswing is the Playland Motel, which opened a few weeks ago not far from the beach, and is already jammed with in-the-know Brooklynites at its weekend patio parties.
The aesthetic is something like Surf Lodge-meets-Ruschmeyer’s, all weathered or whitewashed boards, and a sprawling back deck strung with lights and outfitted with sandy areas for lounging, wading in an inflatable pool, or playing ping-pong or cornhole. (The games are appropriate since the motel is named for the Playland Amusement Park, which was razed in the 80s.) Each of the rooms upstairs – there are just 12 – has been decorated by a different artist. We heard rumors of astroturf, an ersatz murder scene, and a teepee.
This past Sunday, a DJ spun late into the evening, while defectors from the too-crowded Tiki Disco party on the boardwalk, and others who simply preferred the new place, danced, drank concoctions like a strawberry-prosecco cooler and dug into upscale diner fare from the El Almacen and Rosarito Fish Shack folks. A pizzeria should open next week: we’re told the crew is “still seasoning the oven” for the Neapolitan pies.Should you decide to take the A-train east this weekend, more dance parties are planned: No Ordinary Monkey starts Saturday afternoon at 4 PM, and Mexicoco begins Sunday at 3 PM.
You could reserve a room for the night, or spring for the Rock-a-bus, which is making special return trips both nights at 7 PM, 10 PM and 1 AM for $10 one-way.
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NY Times
Click to ViewcloseNY TimesPlayland Motel -
by Patrick Heij
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The Rockaways are already home to a colony of raffish surfers, young artists piled into bungalows and Bushwick-types who have made it their urban beach resort. Now it has a designer motel with a hopping bar scene populated by the sort of young, well-coiffed life-forms that might otherwise go to Montauk. Opened last month, the Playland Motel is run by the owners of the Output dance club and Rosarito Fish Shack in Williamsburg. “It feels like Berlin or Ibiza,” David Terranova, a music video producer from Brooklyn, said last weekend at a crowded dance party.
THE PLACE
Playland took over a corner in a roughneck section of the Rockaways that once housed the Tap and Grill clam bar, a block inland from the beach. Inside, filament bulbs and artfully weathered wood assure patrons that they are in the right place, while a stuffed marlin and plastic palm trees conjure Beachtown, U.S.A. The real draw is the huge backyard, where sandy gravel, colorful beach umbrellas and campy deck chairs surround a large wooden deck that doubles as a dance floor. Out of sight are the 12 snug motel rooms ($150 to $225 a night, depending on demand), individually designed by artists.
THE CROWD
Blithe, fashionable and flirty, the cool crowd seems to be rapidly approaching or reluctantly departing the age of 30. Last Saturday night, guys in cuffed Hawaiian shirts and mesh snapbacks got friendly with girls in denim jumpers and Zubaz-like pants in tropical prints. Representing the local contingent, a woman in a sleeveless soccer jersey bounced around the dance floor on an invisible jackhammer.
GETTING IN
No cover. Anything goes for attire, but “bikinis are encouraged,” said Jamie Wiseman, an owner, half-joking.
PLAYLIST
With Olivier Spencer of DFA Records as music director, expect a curated mix of classic house, jubilant disco and high-profile D.J.’s.
DRINKS
Summery cocktails like Pimm’s Cups and caipirinhas are humanely priced at $10. Pair a Narragansett tall boy ($5) with a fluke ceviche ($12) or a lobster roll ($18).
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A Hotel Life
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