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The hottest way to kick up your heels this summer? Dancing the night away at the Playland Motel, a year-old space that’s helping the Rockaways shift from a storm-battered cove to its former glory as a premier New York beach.

The motel’s bar is booking big-name DJs, including MGMT’s Andrew VanWyngarden, for dance parties where sweaty, scantily clad bodies gyrate. And the setting is just as cool as the music.

The walls of the bar are made of weathered wood, reminiscent of a beach shack, and the space is filled with bright orange tables and a light-up neon palm tree. Beachgoers in their 20s and early 30s, clad in coverups and pastel shorts, drag sand in with them. Some carry skateboards; surfers pop in after a day on the waves.

“I really love the idea of the Rockaways becoming something bigger and better,” says Hank O’Donnell, a 24-year-old Williamsburg resident who works in real estate. Like him, many of Playland’s patrons are young Brooklynites visiting the area for the day.

The hot spot opened last Fourth of July weekend across the street from the old Playland amusement park, which was torn down in 1987 after 86 years of operation. And although Playland is techincally a hotel by function, the real draw is the backyard: a large, sandy area with a bar, candy-colored lawn chairs, wading pools, pingpong and cornhole.

“We became enamored with the Rockaways,” says co-owner Robin Scott of the inspiration to open Playland. “We were also a little bit worn out on trying to get down to Montauk and the Hamptons.”

And unlike the Hamptons, you can comfortably wear your bikini in the bar without any sneers or sidelong glances.

“After the beach, you don’t want anything uptight,” says Giulia Simioni, 32, who’s sipping a Landshark beer. She’s been to the Playland to mingle with surfers almost every weekend since last summer.

Playland has become a the hangout of choice for 20 and 30-something Brooklynites visiting the Rockaways for the day.

For 2014, the motel brought in artists to redesign some of the guest rooms and added a new food option, Bolivian Llama Party, which serves empanadas and pork sandwiches. Attached to the establishment is Whit’s End, a pizzeria run by Whitney Aycock, who serves up wood-fired pies with fresh ingredients such as arugula and lemon ricotta. Alcock, who lives on the Rockaway peninsula, says Playland is way overdue.

“It should’ve been here forever ago,” says Aycock, 40. “No pretension — [it just] fits the neighborhood.”

Rockaway’s Playland Motel is now open for business, bringing a boutique, bar, and restaurant to the neighborhood, all packaged up like the .

On the inside, the owners had twelve different artists design the rooms—one is painted like a murder scene, another has a Tee Pee for a bed, etc.—which go for around $250 a night (weekdays this is about $50 less). But you don’t need to be some high rolling overnight guest to enjoy the place: there’s a restaurant, a bar, and a little fake beach. There you’ll find a deejay, a game of cornhole, an inflatable pool, and and a giant white wall that will eventually be home to projections and movies.

Photographer Tod Seelie dropped by last weekend to check the scene out, and tells us the crowd was “very attractive. On the younger side. Seemed to be a decent mix of visitors and locals.” But on weekdays the place has a more local crowd (“the night before had been mostly local firemen”). He added: “People seemed really friendly, much more so than an average New Yorker is used to…” but surely that will change if we ever start referring to this neighborhood as Rocktauk 🙁

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 ofBeats, 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.)

What: Playland Motel

Where: 97-20 Rockaway Beach Blvd., Rockaway Beach, New York 11694
How much: From approximately $200 a night
Highlights: In addition to the quirky rooms individually designed by artists, the motel is close to the beach and even has its own sandy play area with plenty of seating to lounge.
Design draw: Twelve kitschy, artist-designed room, each with their own design motif.
Book it: Call 718.318.1035 or email sleep@playlandhotel.com

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.

Forty-five minutes on the A-train from the southern tip of Manhattan, a narrow strip of Long Island called the Rockaway Peninsula extends into the Atlantic. On a wintry evening, the avenues that run due east along the shoreline appear to be deserted but, looking out towards the horizon, across expanses of white sand, visitors may be surprised to see small figures bobbing up and down in the frigid sea – not seals, but surfers.

Though these quiet, beachy streets seem a world apart from New York City, the shimmering high-rises of downtown Brooklyn can be glimpsed just beyond the bay’s brush-covered dunes. And on the corner of 98th Street and Rockaway Beach Boulevard, a light burns from behind a large window. “When do hipsters eat pizza?” reads a sandwich board next to the door. “Before it gets cool.”

This is the Playland Motel, opened for business last summer by Jamie Wiseman – a former lawyer now known as Williamsburg’s pre-eminent nightclub developer. Wiseman has been instrumental in transforming that formerly industrial north Brooklyn neighbourhood into what it is today, a byword for trendiness, with its locavore cafés, artisanal cheese shops and craft-beer pubs. His foray into the Rockaway seaboard has prompted many to speculate that this down-at-heel region might be on the brink of a cultural metamorphosis.

When I meet Playland’s head chef Whitney Aycock, he is listening to reggae and leisurely preparing Brussels sprouts for a white pizza with a gluten-free crust. “Tonight’s not as busy as it is in the summer,” he says, dotting the dough with garlic oil. “But you still have 100,000 people who live out here and might want to go out at night and eat good food and have a drink somewhere. Places like that didn’t really exist before Sandy but there’s nothing like being washed away by a hurricane to create a clean slate, literally and figuratively.”

Indeed, the Rockaway Peninsula, more commonly known as the Rockaways, suffered devastating damage in October 2012, when Hurricane Sandy – the second-costliest storm in US history – made landfall on the East Coast. Reducing acres of homes to rubble and killing more than 140 people, Sandy brought this already fragile oceanfront economy to its knees. However, in the 16 months since, hordes of New Yorkers have flocked to the shore to help in the clean-up and reconstruction, businesses have been revitalised and a new local landscape has begun to take shape. Today, this is a region in transition, quickly adapting to accommodate an increasingly diverse population of visitors and residents with ever more cosmopolitan tastes.

Playland speaks to those demands, offering a concentrated dose of trendy Brooklyn. Each of the motel’s 12 rooms is redesigned every season by an artist, from British fashion designer Simon Spurr to local resident Pat Conlon, who brings a bright, pop-art aesthetic to his interior. There are no televisions or telephones, and bathrooms and showers (wainscoted, and painted in pastels) are shared by all paying guests, Hamptons-style.

In the summer, an enormous patio, carpeted with sand, hosts long nights of well-heeled revelry and concerts by Brooklyn’s hippest performers as models in Ray-Bans sip cocktails next to an inflatable pool and a raw oyster bar. “We made a very specific choice to be art- and music-driven,” says Wiseman. “Because this is a New York beach, accessible to every kind of New Yorker – not just Rockaway residents. In season, it’s like staying on the Sunset Strip in the 1970s.”

Lofty aspirations such as these are unprecedented in the remote region’s complex social history. Settled by Native Americans, then the Dutch and then the English, the Rockaways had become New York’s favourite summer retreat by the early 1800s. Playland, a vast amusement park, opened in 1901 (Wiseman’s motel is named after it). Things changed in the 1950s when Robert Moses – the urban planner New Yorkers love to hate – seized on the peninsula as a perfect dumping ground for the city’s undesirables. Close to Manhattan but not too close, the land was quickly given over to nursing homes, rehabilitation centres and low-income housing projects for deinstitutionalised mental patients. By the mid-1980s, Playland was shut down, most of the beach bungalows had been razed and the stable working-class populations had abandoned the district to decay, violence and federal neglect.

A new chapter began with the 2007 opening of Rockaway Taco, a rehabbed plywood shack two blocks from the Playland Motel. Devised by food entrepreneurs David Selig and Andrew Field and powered exclusively by solar energy, the stand has clean white walls hand-painted with a harlequin pattern, and the menu is scrawled on chalk board above the register. With its reasonable prices, proximity to the beach and watermelon agua fresca, it quickly became a neighbourhood favourite – and by the middle of its first summer, hundreds of beachgoers were streaming off the A-train and bee-lining for the fried tilapia tacos with cold cabbage slaw.

Selig is not your everyday developer. An eco-savvy self-starter, he is the kind of man who knows something about everything, from cooking to construction to beekeeping, and he has built his career as a pioneer of New York’s under-appreciated neighbourhoods, often leading the wave of gentrification with his experimental food ventures. “Rockaway Taco sat with a line in front of it for four years, with no competitors on the horizon,” he says. “I couldn’t believe it – I felt like I had to bring the competition there myself.”

He set out to do just that, battling bureaucracy to obtain permits for gourmet food stands along the boardwalk. And in 2011 the Rockaway Beach Concessions opened their doors, many of them outposts of Brooklyn businesses, from Bushwick’s famed Roberta’s Pizza to artisanal butcher The Meat Hook.

Hugging the shore behind a counter tiled in sea green squares, Rippers is a snack shack serving up gourmet burgers alongside tropical cocktails and fresh-pressed juice. Its shoreside patio becomes a dance floor at weekends and its rows of picnic tables host crowds of revellers day and night.

“Until Rockaway Taco appeared, we would go out to the Rockaways knowing we would never ever see another person from the art world but then the concessions opened,” recalls Eugenie Tsai, the curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, who bought a Rockaway home with her husband in 2004. “One day I was in line at Blue Bottle Coffee and someone said ‘Hi’, and it was a big art dealer from Manhattan. That’s when I realised we were on the cusp of a transformation.”

Like Tsai, many members of New York’s cultural elite have recently decided to invest in Rockaway property. The famously reclusive Patti Smith owns a small bungalow on 97th Street and Klaus Biesenbach, director of PS1 (the Museum of Modern Art’s avant-garde outpost in Long Island City), lives here part-time. Swedish architecture firm White Arkitekter, which recently won a competition to rebuild a battered expanse of shore known as Arverne East, hopes the project will encourage the influx of creative types to Rockaway shores.

“We’re dealing with 80 acres of New York beachfront – it should be the most desirable property in all of NYC,” says Selig. “You can go surfing in the morning, get on the subway and be in Wall Street in one hour.”

Ari Zablozki, a sculptor who inherited Marina 59 in the Rockaways in 1998, has built a community of houseboat owners who spend the summers on his docks. In 2011 he launched a rental venture called Boatel, which offers “all summer adventure art camping” on artist-designed floating apartments. Halted by Sandy, Boatel will reopen this summer with a more evolved mission statement, including art performances, lectures and floating installations made from detritus found in Jamaica Bay.

The culinary landscape has been revived as well. Weekend evenings this winter find Sayra’s, the area’s first wine bar – which opened in June – brimming with twentysomethings from the neighbourhood. Low-key and tasteful, with industrial-chic walls of raw, repurposed wood and exposed Edison bulbs, the bar gets so full in warmer weather that customers overflow into the quaint backyard, strewn with seaside trinkets. And, in early December, the newly christened “restaurant row”, a 25-block stretch of Rockaway Beach Boulevard, hosted its very first Rockaway Restaurant Day. Recent additions such as Uma’s, whose traditional Uzbek cuisine often attracts a line around the block, joined the post-Sandy reopening of local favourites Bungalow Bar, Jameson’s and Thai Rock – known for a floating back deck that offers views of the sunset over the water.

The residue of the Rockaways’ troubled past is still present, of course, in the looming grey housing estates set in from the beach, the pothole-pocked streets and long industrial stretches of Rockaway Freeway, where the bay laps against littered banks. But signs of change are everywhere. New-builds with glistening glass balconies dapple the shoreline and the exposed concrete ribs of the old boardwalk – much of which was whisked away by the hurricane – are being fitted with newer, more resilient materials. New York’s Department of Transportation has already approved the installation of the Rockaways’ first public bike rentals along a stretch of oceanfront road that runs under elevated subway tracks, transforming the thoroughfare into NYC’s only all-weather bike path.

“Real estate value is based on human energy,” says Selig, recalling the first time he ran into Queens Museum director Tom Finkelpearl on the boardwalk. “Having Tom here just felt like such a positive thing. The presence of someone who lives in the world of culture and art reminded me that we are in the Rockaways and we are in New York. And that’s why there’s nowhere else like it.”

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 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.

The bar and the building’s facade were built from a barn, while the floors are distressed wood from the Bushwick church. The parking lot in the back is gone, and in its place is a beach club complete with a lounge area made of loose pebbles and outfitted with folding chairs, kiddie pools for wading and a ping-pong table.

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.”

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).

Here are just a few reasons for you to check out the Playland Motel:

1. It’s on Rockaway Beach! The area was devastated after Sandy but it’s all slowly being rebuilt and businesses need a little help boosting the local economy. Yes, that means you! Spend yo dolla. And please don’t be afraid of the commute. Playland has its own subway stop on the A track.

2. The hotties! The place is literally crawling with cute guys. Let’s start with the owners and staff: former models, future models, wannabe models. But the clients and customers are no worse. And the best thing of all: it’s daylight so no aftermath surprises. Eye contact is instant and the rewards all the greater. So beware. The sun is not the only thing heating up the fake pebble beach!

3. The rooms! The spaces may be small and the walls may be thin but I’ll be damned if these are not the coolest interiors I’ve seen. They invited artists, decorators and you guessed it, former models, to put a personal spin on each room. Make sure to check out “My Bloody Dream” – have you seen Carrie? Yes, like that. Brrrr… So if you need to decompress after the grand tour, try the soothing Bambi room…

4. The food! Lobster rolls, octopus salad, oysters, tuna tartare and other deliciousness, all on the daily menu, ready for your consumption.

5. The music! They have some sweet DJs and cool bands performing every weekend. Make sure to check the schedule. Oh, and even the musicians are hot! Seriously.

Vintage 50s bathing suit on sale at Gypsy Nation Vintage; Norwegian thermal by Aerie at Domsey’s; Vintage cut-off shorts customized from old Earl Jeans; Bright red ‘Adilette Trefoil’ slides by Adidas; Multi-color ‘Lolo’ bottom and ‘Tasmin’ bikini top by Kiini; Gold LOVE ring at Gypsy Nation Vintage; Multi-color ‘City Landscape’ earrings by Lizzie Fortunato; Tropical 50s heels by Charlotte Olympia; 18kt gold ‘Coil’ hoops by Sophie Hughes; Candy earrings by Marni; Vintage straw beach bag from Brimfield.

Thank you Lucrecia, Leigh, Andy and the bouncer man for indulging me with your wonderful modeling work!

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.

The ambience is beachy and casual at the Playland Motel in Queens, where artists have contributed unique visions to the décor.

“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 Rosaito 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.”

A version of this article appeared in print on August 4, 2013, on page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: August? Get Outta Town!: Montauk Comes to Queens.

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.