Richard Prakopcyk’s family has owned a valuable piece of land in Seaside Heights for the past 50 years, that for most of its history was used as a surface parking lot.
Last year, he gained approvals to redevelop a block-long lot at 200 Ocean Terrace into 16 condos with ground floor shops. But that’s not what most people in the know are talking about — it’s the architecture of the building, resembling the grand Victorian hotels on Beach Avenue in Cape May.
“We wanted to harken back to the history of the Jersey Shore,” Prakopcyk told Jersey Digs.
It’s not easy to pull off revival-style architecture. “This building can’t go anywhere, but it really does work in that coastal community,” said Jason Hanrahan of Asbury Park firm MODE Architects, who was hired for the project.
Hanrahan, who grew up in Seaside Park and Ortley Beach, has had his hand in a number of high-design projects and has seen his own fate intertwine with that of Seaside Heights. After leaving Manhattan to open his current firm with cofounder Daniel Condatore in 2016, Hanrahan found no shortage of work at the Jersey Shore, helping the coast rebuild after Hurricane Sandy.
The storm is also credited with steering Seaside Heights in a new direction — the devastation gave the town leaders a literal clean slate to repair its reputation, previously known for its seedy motels and fist-bumping night clubs made famous in MTV’s Jersey Shore.
Hanrahan believes the first luxury development at Seaside Heights was the Ocean View cabanas along the south end of the boardwalk, which his firm designed, bringing a contemporary — almost South Beach aesthetic — to a boardwalk that appeared to be stuck in a 1970s timewarp. More important to the local economy, it showed other developers that there was a market for these types of luxury developments.
“That was the first project to really invest time and money into the area,” Hanrahan said. “That in turn, led to a lot more developers coming to the area and investing real money into it.”
What has impressed Hanrahan is that the luxury developments aren’t clustered along the boardwalk, but are moving more inland. The hope is to make Seaside Heights more walkable and give it a streetscape that it never had. In addition to Prakopcyk’s new Victorian-inspired development, the owner of Hook’s Bar & Grill, William Morrissey, is also redeveloping its property into a mixed-use Shingle-style showpiece on Boulevard.
While large corporate developers, such as K. Hovnanian, have joined in on the fun, many of the large-scale redevelopment is at the hands of longtime property owners such as Prakopcyk and Morrissey.
“There wasn’t a boulevard to walk or a town to stroll through — Seaside Heights was just the boardwalk and the beach,” Hanrahan said. “You want a town that’s walkable; you want a Main Street.”
Seaside Heights is older than it appears. The boardwalk dates back to 1915 and a quick Google search will unearth old black-and-white photos of Victorian-era women dressed in long-sleeve shirts and poofy dresses strolling with parasols along the dunes. The town continued to rise in popularity in the post-World War I years and even boasted a stop on the New York & Long Branch Railroad line that ran along what is now Central Avenue.
There are a handful of historic sites at Seaside Heights — the carousel building on the boardwalk is being considered for the National Register of Historic Places. But the shore town never reached the popularity of other nearby shore towns and didn’t leave behind a signature architecture, such as the gingerbread homes of Cape May or Doo Wop motels of Wildwood. Recently a 1930s building — home of the Just Breakfast restaurant — was torn down for townhomes that MODE Architects designed, but it had already lost its charm after renovations.
Perhaps that is why no one really sheds a tear when developers demolish many of the midcentury motels for new construction — there are certainly no preservationists fighting to save them as there are in the Wildwoods. Last year, Shorebeat reported that one developer alone — K. Hovnanian — had torn down 20 motels, including the local house-of-disrepute, Offshore Motel, to make way for townhouses. The neighbors cheered the demolition of the Offshore Motel, known for drug use, fights, and blight.
Another reason for the sea change happening throughout Seaside Heights is Mayor Anthony Vaz’s decision to crack down on troublemaking motels and rowdy bars. A few motels were condemned and others closed after town officials revoked the owners’ mercantile license.
One former owner of the Cloud 9 Inn and Atlantic Inn Motel, Sandip Patel, accused the local government of using the strong arm of code enforcement as a ploy to displace older motels and clear room for luxury condos. However, Patel’s lodgings had racked up a pile of citations and police reports, and a code enforcement official claimed he saw bugs crawling on the front desk of Patel’s front desk at Atlantic Inn Motel during a site visit.
The last vestiges of Seaside’s party-all-night era — notorious clubs like Karma and Bamboo were both owned by John Saddy who had one of his liquor licenses pulled after selling liquor to underage teens — have been demolished.
Hanrahan’s firm designed the building that is set to replace Karma. As the borough’s worst bars and motels are being demolished, rising in their wake are townhomes going for $500,000 a pop. Our publication asked Hanrahan if his younger self would be surprised by the direction the township has gone in during the last decade.
“My younger self?” Hanrahan laughed. “Myself two years would be surprised how much these units are going for.”
