The comfy blue-collar Riviera—Hollywood and Hallandale—goes upscale and skyward.
Hyde Resort & Residences will bring its legendary nightlife scene to Hollywood, Florida.
Walk down the wide, paved Hollywood Beach Broadwalk (not boardwalk) and, with the exception of the classy low beachside wall just high enough to sit on and wash the sand off your feet, the town’s collection of sleepy beachfront motels, salty old taverns, and family-run pizza joints feels frozen in time before the contemporary condo canyons of South Florida existed. Hollywood Beach is still the comfy blue-collar Riviera that Sunny Isles Beach stopped being 20 years ago when 30-story condo towers began replacing kitschy motels.
Yet change is afoot in Hollywood. At the center of it all, Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville Beach Resort is rising just to the south of the Hollywood Beach bandshell. The Margaritaville tower, with its 349 guest rooms, is a stark, although not completely foreign, change to the neighborhood beat. Named after the popular Buffett song, not surprisingly, the resort caters to former beach bums who long ago traded in their surf shacks and lifeguard wages for the suburbs and more flush occupations but want to relive the old days. The resort’s amenities come with straight-from-Buffett-lyrics names poking fun at the laid-back beach town lifestyle that Hollywood Beach has always been about, like the License to Chill Rooftop Bar, the St. Somewhere Spa, and the 5 O’Clock Somewhere Bar.
For the affluent looking for a place to buy, and perhaps less fond of cheeseburgers in paradise, Sage Beach and the Meliá Costa Hollywood Beach Resort are viable choices. Both are residential projects (although Meliá does double-duty as a condo/ hotel) with a sleek, modern, and “beachy” but contemporary aesthetic, and both are in close proximity to the Broadwalk, with Meliá occupying a site stretching from North Surf Road to A1A, just off the Broadwalk, and Sage Beach taking a more intimate oceanfront site in walking distance from the Broadwalk’s southern end. Meliá has units ranging from studios to three bedrooms, while Sage Beach has two to four bedroom units, including six penthouses. Both are under construction and will be completed in 2015.
Sage Beach, designed by the renowned architect Carlos Ott, is among the new luxury condominiums changing the image of Hollywood Beach.
A little bit further south, the formerly sleepy Hallandale Beach, with its mid-century motels, may evolve into the new Sunny Isles Beach of Broward County, with vertiginous buildings that make the town’s iconic beach ball water tower, built at a time when it was the tallest thing in sight, seem almost out of date (historic preservationists, keep a watchful eye). The Related Group is making a substantial investment in the area. Its Apogee Beach is the third condominium tower completed in South Florida since the beginning of the infamous 2008 recession, and its Beachwalk and Hyde Resort & Residences condominium towers are both under construction along with a shared beach club (opening in March) for the future residents. As to Related’s northward expansion, “We are able to deliver beachfront projects at a significant discount to Sunny Isles and South Beach,” says Related’s Condo Division President Carlos Rosso. “It’s a great value proposition for buyers.”
Beachwalk overlooks the Intracoastal Waterway.
The oceanfront Hyde (which is technically just over the border, in Hollywood, but is next door to the Hallandale “ball”), the most high-end of Related’s efforts, is 97 percent sold out, and will operate in partnership with hospitality group SBE, a team Related has joined with on a number of other projects around South Florida. Hyde broke ground in September 2014, while Beachwalk, which is just over the Intracoastal Waterway—and thus a short walk away from the beach instead of on it—topped off a few months before Hyde broke ground and is completely sold out.
Looking to the future (and a few yards west), Related is working on a project for the parking lot south of the Hollywood Crowne Plaza Hotel and directly across A1A from Hyde, which the company plans on launching sometime mid-February.
Luckily Hallandale is getting an infusion of new kitsch to replace the rapidly disappearing old: A giant statue of a pegasus fighting a dragon is the latest addition to the roadside vernacular of Biscayne Boulevard, thanks to Gulfstream Park Race Track. Pegasus, a mythical horse with wings, is winning the match, perhaps symbolizing the speed and swiftness of racing thoroughbreds. The dragon’s meaning is a bit harder to interpret. They’ll both soon be flanked, however, by an even taller speci- men: a condo tower. The Village at Gulfstream Park, the outdoor retail and entertainment area attached to the track, is getting a condo tower called, rather prosaically, Gulfstream Park Tower. Units will range from studios to three-bedrooms, and, though a walk to the beach is a bit of a trek, you can stroll over and bet on the ponies.