By Tim Kelly
The first new hotel project in Ocean City in more than 20 years moved a step closer to reality on Wednesday.
Demolition commenced on a former garage and storage building at 10th Street and Ocean Avenue to clear the way for the construction of the North Island Inn, an all-suites hotel targeted at families planning on extended stays in Ocean City.
Jorge Martinez, project foreman on the demolition job, said his five-man crew from the Vineland-based Souders Excavating should complete knocking down the building, believed to be approximately 95 years old, and clearing the site sometime next week.
He said they reported to the job site at 8 a.m. and one of their bulldozers punched the first hole in the building shortly thereafter.
“It’s coming down pretty easily,” said Martinez, a Vineland resident. “It’s a really old building.”
When an OCNJDaily.com reporter visited the jobsite around 1 p.m., about a quarter of the building had already been reduced to a dusty pile of brick, concrete and plaster.
Martinez said his firm’s pre-demo site work, largely completed over the weekend, stripped the building down to the windows, doors, walls and roof.
“It was all ready for us,” he said. “There’s nothing left in there. The rest of the job is (relatively) easy.”
Ironically, a brand new garage will rise from the site of the old one. But instead of the brown-brick building’s Art Deco-style roofline, familiar to generations of locals and visitors alike, this one will be topped with three additional stories of hotel space.
Fifteen suites are planned for the boutique hotel, which developers Christopher Glancey and Bob Morris say will take advantage of the prime location just steps from the beach and Boardwalk.
Glancey last month told OCNJDaily.com the project will “usher in a new era” for hotel accommodations in town: new state-of-the-art suites for families.
Last month, a Souders crew tore down a former annex of the Impala Island Inn motel, located next door to the garage/storage building.
Glancey and Morris purchased the Impala last year from Anthony J. Frank and family for an undisclosed price and continue to operate it. The brown-brick garage/storage building was owned by the Impala, but previously had served as a garage and storage building for the Flanders Hotel, according to Peter Voudouris, the Flanders director of operations.
The exact age of the building was not immediately known on Wednesday, but if it went up with the Flanders, it would have been completed in 1923.
Voudouris said that prior to the demolition, he was permitted to remove some old signs and other property belonging to the Flanders from the building.
Separate from the issue of a new competitor, Voudouris expressed a bit of sadness to see his property’s old garage come down.
“I like that building,” said Voudouris, who has been involved with the Flanders since the 1990s and is a proud custodian of its history. “I’ll miss seeing it on that corner.”
Construction of the North Island Inn should begin shortly after the former garage site is cleared, Martinez said, and is expected to be completed at an undisclosed cost in time for the traditional summer season opening on Memorial Day weekend in 2020.
Glancey and Morris made their mark as developers in Sea Isle City in recent years with several high-profile commercial and residential building projects. The North Island Inn is their initial foray into Ocean City.
The hotel project gained Planning Board approval in 2017 while the Frank family still owned the Impala. Glancey and Morris inherited the North Island Inn project after buying the Impala.
