As New Yorkers settled back into their weekend rituals in the city after a summer of heading out to the Jersey Shore, the Hamptons and the Catskills, some real estate executives are trying to figure out a way to keep them closer to home next year.
Developers are trying to market a city neighborhood as an alternative weekend getaway. Thus, the area adjacent to Rockaway Beach welcomes the Seavón, a new eight-story luxury condo project hoping to lure vacation home buyers.
Located off the promenade at Beach 119th Street and featuring a rooftop swimming pool, from the outside, the project evokes the Art Deco complexes of South Beach.
“We built a place that will entice people from Manhattan — and [the Rockaways] is just as nice as other beach areas like the Jersey Shore,” said the building’s developer, Oren Evenhar, vice president of Evenhar Development Corporation.
All told, 26 units are for sale, ranging in price from $395,000 for a junior one-bedroom unit to about $1 million for a penthouse suite.
So far, nearly 60 percent of the units have been sold, according to Evenhar. Most of these buyers have indicated the building will be their primary residence, although a few say they will use the Seavón as a vacation home.
In some ways, the project can be seen as chancy: Rockaway Beach (and the surrounding communities) long ago also acquired something of a reputation as a blue-collar enclave, even as many year-round homes, particularly those close to the ocean, began to sell for upwards of $1 million.
The beach is valued by surfers, who claim its breaks are some of the best on the Eastern Seaboard. And because of its proximity, the Rockways have long been a favored destination for day-trippers — a fact memorialized in “Rockaway Beach” by Queens natives the Ramones, who sang, “It’s not hard/Not far to reach.”
Still, the Rockaways — despite the development of upscale residential areas like nearby Belle Harbor and Neponsit — have never enjoyed the kind of cachet of nearby beaches outside of the city.
As a result, the new condo is trying strenuously to cultivate a simulacrum of beach living within the city.
Part of the draw, according to Evenhar, is that Queens feels light years away from Manhattan. “Despite technically being in the same city, it feels like another world out here,” he said.
Brokers are paying close attention to the Seavón, which comes amidst a surge of new building activity on the peninsula.
“This area could take off with development. It’s a nicer beach than most of them in the Hamptons, and it’s less than an hour to Manhattan,” said Andrew Berman, a broker with the firm Urban Underground, who also blogs about development in the Rockaways. “It used to be hard to live in the Rockaways, but more services are starting to arrive.”